Health Sciences Library gets information-management grant

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

The Health Sciences Library has received a two-year, $283,000 Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) Grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to fund strategic planning for a projected integrated, online medical-information environment to serve the educational, research, patient-care and administrative needs of UB's dispersed, multi-institutional, health-care network.

The Health Sciences Library will collaborate on the project with the schools of Health Related Professions, Nursing, Dental Medicine, Pharmacy and Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and their affiliated health-care organizations in Western New York

Local institutions involved in the IAIMS process include those affiliated with Kaleida Health and the Catholic Health System of Western New York, as well as two dozen other hospitals and health-care centers throughout the eight counties of Western New York and several health-care payer corporations, including Health Care Plan, Independent Health and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Western New York.

Gary Byrd, director of the Health Sciences Library and the project's principal investigator, said the projected system will offer ready access to a virtual, knowledge-based library, as well as clinical care, research and educational information resources.

"The goal is to provide health-information resources that are organized and available across an electronic infrastructure that will enhance the processes by which health-care professionals teach and learn, conduct biomedical research, administer health organizations, provide patient care and offer consumer health information," he said.

The project's co-principal investigators are Bruce Holm, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the UB medical school, and Francis Meyer, Jr., vice president for information systems and technology for Kaleida Health.

The project will serve affiliated organizations and individuals in a number of ways.

For institutions, the project is expected to optimize and integrate information-technology goals and strategic priorities; help make effective use of shared expertise and technology, and offer an adaptable, sustainable, high-quality and cost-effective medical-information network with links to many sources of health-care data. IAIMS also will help develop and evaluate advanced information technologies and provide programs and tools to educate and train users.

Individuals will benefit from easy-to-navigate, convenient and timely point-and-click workstations, the availability of information independent of the constraints of time, physical location, organizational affiliation or workplace technology. Planners say the network will be adaptable to changing circumstances and a variety of individual roles and skill levels.

Resources already available online include the medical information databases provided by the NLM through the Hospitals and University at Buffalo Health Information Network (HUBNET). They include searchable indexes of current research reports, a large number of medical and health-care journals and other specialty databases, as well as facilities for online ordering of full-text articles and interlibrary borrowing.

The IAIMS program was initiated by the NLM, a division of the National Institutes of Health, in response to a report in the early 1980s by the Association of American Medical Colleges on the role of libraries in information management. It recommended that academic medical centers develop information networks to help integrated medical units communicate better with those interested in using the information they produce.

A number of other IAIMS systems have been developing under the aegis of hospitals, medical schools and libraries throughout the country, including those at the University of Iowa and the University of Pittsburgh. Byrd said one reason the NLM funded the UB project is because it would link the resources of so many disparate institutions.