Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 08:24:35 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam

From Information Today Inc. [Newslink, September 2003]:

Traditional Information Providers Branch Out By Paula J. Hane Recently, Microsoft announced that a number of healthcare industry software vendors, solution providers, and organizations have developed a range of solutions that take advantage of the 2003 release of Microsoft Office as a platform to increase productivity and improve quality of care. According to Microsoft, these solutions "automate paper-based processes, streamline workflow, and enable workers throughout the healthcare industry to focus on what they do best: healthcare." The technologies implemented in Office position it as a front end to work processes and integrated access to information. Ovid, an operating company of Wolters Kluwer Health, is integrating journal content from its Journals@Ovid database into various Microsoft Office 2003 applications. Healthcare professionals will have access to full-text content from more than 900 medical and health sciences journals. Clinicians or researchers can select an article and view the entire full text, if their institution is an Ovid subscriber, or they can purchase the material through Ovid's PayPerView feature. Bette Brunelle, executive vice president of Ovid, said, "Ovid is dedicated to finding new and innovative methods of integrating content into the enterprise environment that enhance end-user work flow and, by extension, the medical research process." Elsevier announced that it has developed a healthcare reference package compatible with the 2003 release of Microsoft Office. The package includes two of the company's medical reference titles: Dorland's Medical Dictionary and Mosby's Drug Consult. Some of the other healthcare companies that are partnering with Microsoft include Gold Standard Multimedia (which will offer its interactive drug information solution, Clinical Pharmacology, as an add-on product); Allscripts Healthcare Solutions; NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, Inc.; and MICROMEDEX, a division of the Thomson Corp. (which will offer its SaveNotes feature to customize CareNotes Patient Education documents). According to information on the Microsoft site, the Research Task Pane, which uses XML to provide access to data sources, can also search customized corporate data sources. For example, an organization can build a database of information about its products and services, and offer that information through an intranet to its employees. Employees can also incorporate additional third-party data services into their data sources. Microsoft, which had planned to launch Office 2003 in the summer, now says this has been delayed until Oct. 21, 2003, though Office will be pre-installed on some PCs by the end of this month. Google and IEEE Finally, Google, never out of the media spotlight for long, announced that researchers will be able to locate technical papers published by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) using the Google search engine. Google is currently crawling, or indexing, the abstract records for all online IEEE technical documents and standards available through the IEEE Xplore online delivery platform (http://www.ieee.org/ieeexplore). There are now nearly 1 million documents in the IEEE database. The project is expected to be completed this month, at which time Google users will see the linked content in their search results. Abstracts will be available free to everyone, and full-text documents are available to IEEE subscribers or through individual online purchase.