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International Day of Epidemic Preparedness: Dec. 27

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International Epidemic Preparedness Day is December 27
International Epidemic Preparedness Day is December 27
 

Last year, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the United Nations General Assembly designated December 27th as the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness. The Covid-19 pandemic brought to light the need for communities at local, national, and global levels to have systems in place to effectively deal with epidemics when they occur, but to also work towards preventing future epidemics.

Resources:

National Influenza Vaccination Week: December 5 – 11

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It’s not too late to get your flu shot. While the influenza virus is present year-round in the U.S., peak flu activity usually occurs between December and February. Get vaccinated in order to protect yourself and others. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, it may be even more important to get the flu vaccine; lessening your likelihood of serious complications from the flu can help conserve health resources for critically ill patients due to Covid-19 and other diseases. More information on resources: Interesting reads on the history of the flu and the 1918 influenza pandemic:

HSL, ITHS receive AAMC GIR Excellence Award for REDCap support during COVID-19

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Medical design logo
Medical design logo

Librarians and staff from the University of Washington’s Health Sciences Library (HSL) and Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) have been named as recipients of the prestigious Association of American Medical Colleges’ Group on Information Resources (AAMC GIR) Excellence Award for their support of UW’s REDCap data collection platform throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The AAMC GIR Excellence Award, bestowed annually on an individual or institutional or cross-institutional team, recognizes “contributions in the academic medical center information technology arena that inspire and impact the work [of AAMC GIR] to advance academic medicine.” It highlights a “work of excellence in the academic medical information technology domain” that has “innovative national impact or institutional impact for other institutions to follow.”

With Seattle emerging as one of the first COVID-19 hot spots in North America, UW’s REDCap instance became a key clinical resource for UW Medicine and local and county government health agencies during the pandemic, supporting projects from early case tracking to contract tracing to back-to-campus testing. UW’s REDCap instance, a HIPAA-compliant data collection platform, hosts more than 650 COVID-related projects, including a number of national research projects with collaborators from around the country. The iterative nature of COVID-19 projects, particularly in the initial weeks and months of the pandemic, frequently led to major changes in scope, design, and deployment on a day-by-day or hour-by-hour so they could be effectively deployed by campus, local, and county health agencies.

User support for REDCap, a HIPAA-compliant data collection platform, is administered through a ticketing system supported by librarians and staff from HSL, ITHS, UW Medicine IT, and the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Region 5. The nine HSL staff and administrators from UW Medicine IT and ITHS triaged more than 18,000 tickets between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, an increase of almost 70 percent on the year before. Agents respond to a range of user requests, from simple project creation and change tickets to complex design best practices and troubleshooting questions on surveys sent to tens of thousands.

The UW REDCap instance has served as a pillar of UW Medicine’s clinical care and research efforts throughout the five-state WWAMI region (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho) since its launch in 2012 by providing a foundational data platform to support clinicians, researchers, and students across a wide range of health sciences areas. HSL librarians and staff have served as REDCap ticketing agents since late 2016 as part of the Translational Research and Information Lab (TRAIL) initiative, a five-partner collaboration between leading UW health sciences units. TRAIL aims to leverage existing expertise and space to deliver clinical research data management services and emerging technology support, with 14 diverse data-related online and in-person services covering topics that include REDCap, Leaf cohort discovery, virtual reality, mobile app development, biomedical informatics, biostatistics, and bioethics.

Watch the 2021 AAMC Awards Recognition Event and read the awards program book (PDF).

UW REDCap Support Team

  • Amber Atkins, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Lynly Beard, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Bas de Veer, Institute of Translational Health Sciences
  • Adam Garrett, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Courtney Howell, Institute of Translational Health Sciences
  • Ashleigh Lewis, Institute of Translational Health Sciences
  • Paul Ludecke, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Michael Moore, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Sara Rind, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Ruba Sadi, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Nancy Shin, Network of the National Library of Medicine, Region 5
  • Frank Stieber, UW Health Sciences Library

TRAIL Leadership

  • Tania Bardyn, UW Health Sciences Library
  • Sean Mooney, UW School of Medicine Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

About the AAMC GIR Excellence Award

The GIR Excellence Award is given to an individual, or institutional or cross-institutional team, that contributed to a work of excellence in academic medical information technology domain, supporting one or more of the mission areas of the academic medical centers: clinical, educational, or research, and including administration. This award reflects a contribution that has an innovative national impact or institutional impact that is a model for other institutions to follow. The GIR Excellence Award selection criteria are designed to consider institutions of various sizes and available resources equitably. The established criteria include:

  • Impact: Single Institution (One Area or Multiple Areas), Multiple Institutions
  • Innovation: Sustainable and/or uniqueness
  • Implementation State: Conceptualized, Tested or Implemented
  • Shareability: Not Disseminated, Internal Only, Shared via One or More External Mediums

The evaluation criteria also assess a nominated work of excellence’s potential benefit to diversity and inclusion.

UW Libraries Health Sciences Library awarded $6.3M grant from National Library of Medicine to increase health equity through information

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Logo of the Network of the National Library of Medicine
Logo of the Network of the National Library of Medicine

April 9, 2021 -- The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has awarded a five-year, $ 6.3 million UG4 cooperative agreement grant to Principal Investigator Tania Bardyn and Project Lead Cathy Burroughs at the UW Health Sciences Library to lead Region 5 of the Regional Medical Library (RML) serving a six-state region including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and U.S. Territories through the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM). This will be the second UG4 cooperative agreement grant for UW from the NIH/National Library of Medicine. Region 5 is part of the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM), which includes 7 Regional Medical Libraries (RMLs) nationwide based at other health sciences libraries.

The core mission of the NNLM is to improve access to the highest level of evidence-based health information, with an emphasis on reaching the most underserved communities. The NLM grant funds the RML’s Region 5 program Reaching More People in More Ways to advance data driven health, health equity and health literacy through community-driven outreach that equitably informs U.S. researchers, health professionals, librarians, educators, and the public about the NLM’s products, information services, funding, professional development, and training. The program also provides direct funding (grants) to regional partners to improve access through technology and provide training to equalize and enhance access to health information for everyone – from clinicians to patients and to the general public.

“This award is a testament to the value of the health information outreach the Pacific Northwest Region of the NNLM has performed over the past 50 years, and our capacity and desire to expand these efforts to California, Hawaii, Nevada, and U.S. Territories over the next five years.” says Tania Bardyn, Principal Investigator of the NNLM Region 5 and Associate Dean for Health Sciences at the UW Libraries.

UW has hosted the Regional Medical Library (RML) in the Pacific Northwest Region (PNR) since the program’s inception in 1968. The geography of the grant has largely remained unchanged in the last 53 years. Beginning in 2021, under the new redistributed geography of this grant, the RML at UW Health Sciences Library will expand its programmatic outreach beyond the Pacific Northwest to 3 new states including California, Nevada, and Hawaii. This will be the only RML serving 25 public and private medical schools’ libraries located on the West Coast.

The RML is an essential service for physicians, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, social workers, allied health and public health professionals who need access to the most up-to-date evidence-based research and health information. Providers require continuous training, access to tools and knowledge of resources on the front lines of healthcare; however, training and access to this information is limited for many healthcare providers, especially in underserved communities. Where there is a lack of providers, or no providers at all in some cases, online access to clinical resources and data are critical to healthcare delivery.

Librarians play a vital role in providing continuing education for the clinical profession, not only by providing updates on the latest resources and information services, but also in teaching providers how to become more independent and adept and utilizing search technologies that can have a dramatic and positive impact on quality of care.

In addition to facilitating the RML to support medical communities across six states and territories, the UW Libraries’ Health Sciences Library supports the entire UW health sciences community including six schools as well as health professionals and researchers through local, regional, national and international networks like HEALWA.

For more information contact:

Catherine M. Burroughs, MLS

Executive Director

Network of the National Library of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195-7155

206.543.9261 | cburroug@uw.edu

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