The National Network Library of Medicine Mid-Atlantic Region shares the following:

NLM Resource Update: LiverTox

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) LiverTox resource is a free website providing up-to-date, comprehensive and unbiased information about drug-induced liver injury caused by prescription and nonprescription drugs, herbals, and dietary supplements. LiverTox represents a collaborative effort by medical and scientific specialists to provide a central repository of clinical information in support of clinical and basic research on the prevention and control of drug-induced liver injury. The site also provides guidance to clinicians and healthcare providers on the diagnosis and management of this important cause of liver disease. LiverTox contains approximately 850 drug and herbal records. It is a joint effort of the Liver Disease Research Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the Division of Specialized Information Services (SIS) of NLM.

Look for these LiverTox updates in the coming months:

·        Addition of about 100 new records.

·        New histopathologic imaging (microscopic structure of diseased tissue) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) included in drug records.

·        Section providing public access to reference cases, initially populated with clinical cases from the Drug-Induced Liver Injury Network, a consortium of eight academic medical centers throughout the United States. This repository will allow for statistical analyses of trends in drug-induced liver disease, as well as better characterization of clinical patterns of injury.

NEW: Training Thursday! All registrants to this virtual conference will receive a login to the associated Training Thursday on Crafting a Scientific Data Management Plan to be held on February 26 from 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). (Separate registration to the training event only is also available.)  If you are unable to attend the Training Thursday in person, you can view the recording of the session.

TOPICS AND SPEAKERS
Keynote Address – Laura J. Biven, Ph.D., Senior Science and Technology Advisor, Office of the Deputy Director for Science Programs, Office of Science, US Department of Energy

Research Data Curation – Jennifer Doty, Research Data Librarian, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, Emory University, Robert W. Woodruff Library

Data Management Best Practices – Regina F. Raboin, Science Research and Instruction Librarian/ Data Management Services Group Coordinator, Tisch Library, Tufts University

DART Project: Data Management Plans as a Research Tool – Amanda L. Whitmire, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Data Management Specialist, Oregon State University Libraries & Press

Building Data Management Capacity – Heidi Imker, Ph.D., Director of the Research Data Service, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

FORCE11 – Dr. Melissa Haendel, Assistant Professor, Ontology Development Group, OHSU Library, Department of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University

The RMap Project – Sheila M. Morrissey, Senior Research Developer, Ithaka

 The Open Science Framework – Andrew Sallans, Partnerships, Collaborations, and Funding, Center for Open Science

Roundtable Discussion

REGISTRATION

Registration is per site (access for one computer) and closes at 4:00 pm Eastern on February 17, 2015 (the day before the virtual conference). Discounts are available for NISO members and students. All virtual conference registrants receive access to the recorded version for one year.

Can’t make it on the day of the virtual conference? All registrants receive access to the recorded version for one year. Take advantage of the Virtual Conference subscription package (http://www.niso.org/news/events/2015/virtual_conferences/#subscription) for all six of the 2015 Virtual Conferences and save 33%. (Previously held 2014 virtual conferences available in recorded versions.)

For more information and to register: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2015/virtual_conferences/sci_data_management/

New Toolkit on Health Literacy and Health Insurance Literacy

According to recent studies, and despite new private insurance coverage over the past year, many people do not understand the very terms and concepts necessary to make informed choices. A new Alliance for Health Reform Toolkit, Health Literacy and Health Insurance Literacy: Do Consumers Know What they are Buying? addresses the extent and significance of both health literacy and health insurance literacy for Americans buying and using health insurance.

A few highlights from the Toolkit:

·        Nearly nine out of ten adults have difficulty using health information to make informed decisions about their health.

·        Half of Americans don’t understand such basic health insurance terms as premium, deductible and copay.

·        Thirty-seven percent of marketplace enrollees did not know their deductible, and 47% of those receiving subsidies did not know the amount of federal assistance they were getting.

·        The cost of low health literacy in the United States currently represents between 7% and 17% of all personal health care expenditures.

Contents of the Toolkit include:

·        An overview of problems associated with health literacy as well as studies analyzing their impact.

·        Links to reports and news articles explaining and analyzing the issue.

·        Contact information for leading experts on the issue.

Ebola at One Year

WHO has a series of 14 papers based on the past year of the Ebola epidemic: http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/one-year-report/introduction/en/

New Tools to Help Consumers during Tax Season

Today, CMS released new tools to help consumers during the upcoming tax filing season.  The 2015 tax season is the first time individuals and families will be asked for some basic information regarding their health insurance on their tax returns.  Specifically, CMS has made available two tools to help consumers fill out IRS Forms 8962 and 8965.  One tool helps consumers determine the amount of their 2014 Premium Tax Credit for Form 8962.  The second tool helps consumers determine whether or not they qualify for the exemption for coverage being unaffordable, for Form 8965.

While the vast majority of tax filers – over three quarters – will just need to check a box on their tax return indicating they had health coverage for all of 2014, people who purchased coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplaces, or decided not to enroll in coverage, should be aware of the additional steps that will be a part of the tax filing process starting this year. Consumers will have questions about this new process and the Administration is committed to providing the information and tools tax filers need to understand the new requirements.

These tools can be accessed:   https://www.healthcare.gov/taxes/

In addition, CMS has posted a new fact sheet for consumers about health coverage and federal income taxes as well as specific information on different types of exemptions.

The fact sheet can be found here: http://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/facts/factsheets/2015/01/health-coverage-federal-income-taxes.html

NAL Unveils New Search Engine for Published USDA Research

The National Agricultural Library (NAL) has unveiled PubAg, a user-friendly search engine that gives the public enhanced access to research published by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists. NAL is part of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS).

PubAg, which can be found at PubAg.nal.usda.gov, is a new portal for literature searches and full-text access of more than 40,000 scientific journal articles by USDA researchers, mostly from 1997 to 2014. New articles by USDA researchers will be added almost daily, and older articles may be added if possible. There is no access fee for PubAg.

Phase I of PubAg provides access for searches of 340,000 peer-reviewed agriculturally related scientific literature, mostly from 2002 to 2012, each entry offering a citation, abstract and a link to the article if available from the publisher. This initial group of highly relevant, high-quality literature was taken from the 4 million bibliographic citations in NAL’s database.

Phase II of PubAg, planned for later in 2015, will include the remainder of NAL’s significant bibliographic records.

PubAg has been specifically designed to be easy to use and to serve a number of diverse users including the public, farmers, scientists, academicians and students. There is no requirement for a username, password or any other form of registration to use PubAg.

NAL has one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive compilations of agricultural information available.

“Guide on the Side” Software for Creating Interactive Tutorials

The University of Arizona (UA) libraries developed an open-source tool called Guide on the Side for creating interactive tutorials. The left frame of the screen contains instructions and can also have quizzes or links to other information, and the larger, right side has the live website to interact with, without losing your place in the tutorial. A four-minute introductory video about the software is available for viewing on the NLM National Training Center (NTC) web site.

Guide on the Side is an open source PHP and MySQL program and needs to be installed on a server. The program requires a handful of common PHP packages enabled. Once installed, it is very easy for someone without programming experience to create interactive tutorials, which can be easily updated if the interface of the database or other web resource changes. Several examples of Guide on the Side tutorials for TOXNET resources are available on the NTC web site. The UA Libraries have developed more than 25 tutorials using the tool, which have received nearly 73,000 uses in one year. Other libraries have installed the software, begun creating tutorials, and joined a discussion group to continue improving the software.

Measuring Success Toolkit

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a form of assessment used to help improve the performance and achievement of program results and often used by both non-government organizations (NGOs) and government agencies. The staircase diagram above describes six questions that M&E can help answer through program planning, monitoring, and evaluation. More information clarifying the difference between monitoring and evaluation as well as guidance for each of the six questions is available at this link.

While not specific to health information outreach programs, the Measuring Success Toolkit at https://www.urbanreproductivehealth.org/toolkits/measuring-success from the Urban Reproductive Health Initiative is about health program planning, monitoring and evaluation. The toolkit provides helpful resources from the initiative’s multi-country perspective of working with the urban poor and the significant health disparities they face that may be helpful to consult with your health information outreach partners to underserved communities.  It includes subject-specific M&E resources such as maternal & child health and HIV/AIDs, and the resources within the toolkit are selected by M&E experts and reviewed quarterly following established criteria to identify important resources from diverse perspectives that include accurate, up to date information.