Interested in life sciences and healthcare-related standards? There’s a lot of them to keep track of. To make your job easier, the folks at XML Cover Pages have created XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries, an online directory of clinical research and healthcare industry standards. While not complete, it’s a great place to start your research.

Here you’ll find information about:

• ASTM Committee E31 on Healthcare Informatics
• CDC Public Health Information Network (PHIN)
• CEN/TC 251 Health Informatics
• CEN ISSS eHealth Standardization Focus Group
• Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC)
• Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)
• Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) Initiative
• Continuity of Care Record (CCR)
• Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM)
• Electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) for Pharmaceuticals
• Guideline Elements Model (GEM)
• Healthcare Informatics Standards Board (HISB)
• Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Health Level Seven (HL7)
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)
• ITU-T Study Group 16
• Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC)
• OASIS International Health Continuum (IHC) Technical Committee
• Open Electronic Health Record Foundation (openEHR)
• Structured Product Labeling (SPL)
• Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED)
• Web3D Consortium Medical Working Group (MedX3D)

Check out XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries.

Wal-Mart has begun rolling out personal electronic health records to a handful of employees as part of a plan to eventually provide more than a million of the retailer’s workers and their dependents with digitized health records, says Information Week. 

Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with the overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. According to the company, “users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online”. See some early beta test screen shots and read what http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-08-14-n43.html">Google Blogoscoped has to say about Google Health.

Knowing how to enumerate the benefits of modular content and knowing how to go about implementing a single-sourcing project are two very different kettle of fish. As with any project that involves a technology component, there are multiple ways to handle each aspect. Each organization has different needs, and so will want to derive different benefits from single-sourcing their content. There are different methods of single-sourcing content, which will require different technologies. Understanding the technologies and their implications is critical, as the pitfalls of going down the wrong path may prevent an organization from deriving the very benefits they set out to achieve.

Learn more about single sourcing implementations, and get the skinny on how-to tips and cautions in this podcast interview with trainer and consultant Neil Perlin.

A new book titled “Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design” is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com. (Shipping is estimated to begin at the beginning of March 2008.) Published by O’Reilly, the book demonstrates how successful businesses should be using customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

This book was a collaboration by practitioners from the leading experience strategy and design company, Adaptive Path. The professionals at Adaptive Path are considered thought leaders in the user experience field. They share their knowledge freely, and their contributions can be found on various community of practice sites such as Boxes and Arrows and the Adaptive Path website and blog.

The weak US dollar will create opportunities for American companies to sell their products abroad, according to John Yunker, who predicts that because of this, globalization of web content will be strong in 2008. Whereas in past years, a Web strategy may have been a full English site with a few localized pages in other languages, this year the balance will tip. Companies will have to rethink where they want to expand their markets, and invest some marketing dollars into boosting their globalization efforts.

Yunker, who since 2002 has been benchmarking websites for their localization efforts, issues an annual Web Globalization Report Card. In it, he reviews some 225 sites, which on average, each supports some twenty languages. Yunker evaluates them for their effectiveness on a number of criteria of interest to global users. He gave his globalization predictions for 2008 in a December post of his Global by Design blog.

Finding a way to turn direct mailing campaigns from irrelevant throw-aways into highly relevant keepers has been, until recently, a marketer’s dream. JFM Concepts has found a way to improve campaign performance by giving marketers the tools needed to create and manage their campaigns, and to segment and deliver personalized marketing messages. By reducing marketing fatigue with irrelevant information, it increases receptiveness to messages that matter.

Personalization is, in effect, optimizing the marketing message for an audience of one. The technology behind the process, variable data printing, has been combined with opt-in marketing and the web to create a powerful user experience. At the same time, the process yields far better results for marketing organizations than traditional campaigns. Learn more about variable data printing and its role in personalized marketing campaigns in this white paper by DocTrain Life Sciences presenter James Michelson and John Fager from JFM Concepts.

The competitive advantage of good user experience is well-established: easier-to-use sites are more used, better used, and repeatedly used. Users are happier, and as a result, more loyal. And as a result, the companies that create the sites are happier - knowing they’ve found the sweet spot: a user experience that keeps their customers engaged.

Persuasive design has moved from being a mystic art to a cognitive science, and Human Factors International (HFI) has been at the forefront of the movement to codify the principles behind what seemed to be the magic elixir. HFI Chief Experience Officer, Jerome Nadel and Jay More, President, discuss the strategy of persuasive design in this HFI webinar.

Adobe Systems publishes a product support and information blog that covers topics of interest to both users of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite and users of the individual products that make up the Suite: RoboHelp, FrameMaker, Acrobat 3D and Captivate.

Visit the Technical Communication blog on the web or subscribe to the Technical Communication blog RSS feed using your favorite news reader.

Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL)offers a quick and inexpensive test to help you understand the value of a content reuse strategy for your specific document collection. It’s called the Content Reuse Assessment. It allows you to analyze a significant cross-section of your document collection and get back objective reuse statistics, as well as specific identification of duplicate and “near duplicate” instances. The Assessment includes a Summary Report with reuse potential metrics for your document set, as well as a detailed analysis report displaying location and content of exact and close matches.

DCL has found most document collections to contain more than 50% redundancy, meaning you’re maintaining twice as much content as you need to… at twice the expense. It also means that you’re likely updating the same content multiple times, you’re risking excess errors creeping in, and you’re reinventing text that you’ve already written.

Learn more about the DCL Content Reuse Assessment.

There are distinct business advantages to using modular writing techniques, particularly in a team environment where the opportunity exists for content to be shared between writers for re-use among information products such as product descriptions, procedures, error messages, interface instructions, and boilerplate text. Writers who have made the switch to this type of writing, willingly or because of corporate adoption of modular design, generally profess they could never return to what they perceive as a chaotic, uncontrolled method of assembling content. The ability to efficiently and effectively construct a document with a building block approach using content chunks, with the confidence that the content inside those building blocks will all be compatible, is certainly seductive.

Pamela Kostur of Parallax Communications is keenly aware of the benefits. In her work with companies who want to move to structured writing for content re-use, she has found that making the case is important for those writers whose resistance is rooted in a fear of loss of creativity or autonomy. Download the white paper Whose content is it anyway? to understand the argument for modular writing.

Usability is a critical factor in keeping consumers engaged during a transaction. Without a clear understanding of a consumer’s motivation, combined with an easy navigational pathway through the task at hand, converting a browser into a buyer. Mona Patel, Executive Director of Human Factors International, a leading North American user experience firm, has introduced a methodology that provides a way of understanding elements of consumer experience. From user motivation to site elements to building brand loyalty, the methodology covers best practices.

To learn more about the methodology, watch The Difference Between Evaluating ‘Can Do’ and ‘Will Do’ – How Persuasion, Emotion and Trust Relate to Conversion, a free archived webinar featuring Mona Patel and Susan Weinschenk. You might also want to download the accompanying white paper.

Global Language Services may provide professional translation services in over a hundred languages, but they realize that translation is not a simple matter. Aside from the linguistic issues, the cultural aspects make the translation of any text a complicated matter. Add to that the legal complexities within the life sciences space, and the need for a translation agency with a strong awareness of industry issues quickly becomes apparent.

There are precise requirements in the translation of, for example, Informed Consent forms, to protect the rights of non-English speakers during clinical trials. To be sure that consent is truly informed consent, the language in an Informed Consent must be considered sufficiently clear to the trial subject. It must stay consistent between the original language and translated form, and adhere to precise translation equivalents. The wording of the consent form is monitored carefully by multiple institutions. In addition, the consent must be demonstrated to be understood. In other words, the document must be shown to be readable - a subjective, yet monitored, condition.

Global Language Services provides industry white papers to helps companies with their translations and make informed decisions related to the translation and localization space:

• Tip sheets - includes pharmaceutical and medical topics
• White papers - culture, linguistics, localization, and technology topics

The DITA Maturity Model has just been released, and is available as a free download. Jointly authored by Amber Swope (JustSystems) and Michael Priestley (IBM), the DITA Maturity Model provides the industry with a graduated methodology for successfully implementing DITA within an organization.

The publication of this paper dispels the myth that implementing DITA is an all-or-nothing proposition. The DITA Maturity Model divides a DITA adoption into six levels, with each level requiring a greater investment, and also reaping a greater ROI. Organizations with more resources, and more to gain, can invest considerably more time and effort into an implementation, but that doesn’t mean that smaller organizations need to be excluded from gaining any benefits that might accrue to them from a simple implementation.

• Download the DITA Maturity Model white paper
• Keep informed about DITA developments at DITA News
• Be part of a DITA community

An important phase of a content management implementation is a proof-of-concept, which generally takes place after you’ve made your final choice but before you’ve purchased the software. While some vendors may encourage potential buyers to bypass the proof-of-concept stage and head directly for the dotted line, Vasont Systems’ Suzanne Mescan published an article that provides guidelines for organizations wanting to follow a practice that will ensure project success.

The Top Ten Tips for a Successful Content Management Proof of Concept is not specific to Vasont Systems and, truth be told, could be applied to all types of technology projects. The steps may seem mostly common sense to the experienced integrator, but a good reminder, and an extremely valuable guideline to the first-time content management project manager.

The power of content management goes beyond a single publication channel. The ability to exchange content between various departments within an organization has long gone beyond being a luxury. It has become a necessity, with substantial business benefit. This has particular significance in the life science industry, where the volume of information exponentially increases the potential for re-use.

The ability to repurpose content for multiple outputs - for documentation, for training material, and as content chunks integrated into a knowledge center takes both knowledge of content management from the Web side as well as the component side, and a content management system that can handle both component content management and web content management. To read how one healthcare information technology supplier structured their content to single-source it for documentation, training, and customer support, download the case study from the Vasont Systems website.

While American companies are rushing to enter the Chinese market, Don DePalma is very much the voice of reason. His advice may run contrary to popular opinion, but his arguments are extremely compelling. He points out that rather than playing a numbers game, you should be looking at quality over quantity of online populations: which groups are more likely to open their wallets? Whether you consider DePalma an inspiration or a wet blanket, his article in Chief Marketer is a highly compelling read for any company ready to extend their reach into the global marketplace.

Indiana’s $69 billion health industry, defined as biopharmaceuticals, medical devices and instruments, healthcare delivery, laboratories and payors – accounts for over 20 percent of Indiana’s total state taxes and almost 10 percent of the state’s employment. Across Indiana, researchers are working on the cutting edge of life science discovery and translating those advancements into new business opportunities and the latest in therapeutic treatments. Universities, private industry, and government unite collaboratively here to further develop Indiana’s life science base and network of supporting businesses. Recognized repeatedly as a premier cluster for pharmaceuticals, medical devices and ag biotechnology, the impact of Indiana’s research and development strength reaches around the world.

Documentation and Training Life Sciences association sponsor, Indiana Health Industry Forum has created a useful online resource, the “Indiana Health Industry Map”. We provide an iPaper version of the map below.

ITtoolbox has introduced its new Vendor Research Directory. This interactive online directory for the information technology industry is the first resource of its kind to marry user-generated content with information from technology vendors to create a comprehensive and objective tool for evaluating IT purchasing decisions.

Test drive it today!

By Mark Gross, President, Data Conversion Laboratory

In an age when we download movies at will, store piles of personal records on our BlackBerry devices, beam software to each other’s Palms, and store truckloads of digital photos on some website “out there”—accessible from anywhere—it’s frustrating that we aren’t yet applying the same technology to medical records to make them easily accessible to those who need them. I know there are obstacles—confidentiality, liability, resistance to change, and of course paying for it—and I’m not an expert in most of these, but it does seem that these issues are already addressed in other, less-technologically-advanced industries. It’s ironic that it’s in medicine, with all its technological advances, and day-to-day impact on life, that adaption of electronic record keeping would be so slow.

While I spend most days on mission-critical electronic data for a number of industries, how best to obtain, store and transmit it, none seem as personal as health care.

Not long ago, when my father-in-law was quite ill, I spent much time in the intensive care unit of a major hospital. The care was great, the nurses terrific, and the equipment state of the art. Yet, I was struck by the irony of nurses and doctors writing out, in long hand, the readouts from quarter-million dollar automated diagnostic equipment into a bedside notebook. And when someone misplaced “the notebook” the scurrying to find it would have been entertaining, if it weren’t so serious. Recently my mother saw three doctors, a day apart, all within a block of each other, yet each took blood and ordered his own blood tests, all on the same matter.

When I saw a cardiologist a little while back, he took my history on his tablet computer, accessed some information off the internet, had the results of my tests sent to his computer, and in the follow-up consultation had all my test results and history immediately available on his PC. And I am happy to see recently renewed discussion about advancing the automation of medical records, (also known as electronic medical records, or EMR). The conversation about EMR has been ongoing for several years. Software companies have been built and broken based on the idea. And it seems that everyone is in agreement that EMR is good for medicine. In fact, in 2005 the nonprofit research organization, Rand Corporation, produced an 2007 CDC Study (PDF) of office-based physicians reported only a 12.4% adoption of a comprehensive EMR by physicians’ offices in 2006, and an earlier CDC study (PDF) reported only about one-third of hospitals used electronic medical records. This, despite a recent Wall Street Journal online poll that reports three-quarters of all respondents “agree that patients could receive better care if doctors and researchers were able to share information more easily via electronic systems and 63% agree sharing of such records could decrease medical errors.” There are, however, some signs that things may be changing.

• A few months ago (Oct ‘07), then Eli Lilly CEO Sidney Taurel called for an “information revolution” in health care in his remarks to The Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit. Taurel encourages the medical community to embrace EMR as “a key component of broader quality.”
• Continued research is being done to find out what the impact of EMR is on the quality and costs of healthcare. One study suggests that as healthcare becomes more individualized and complicated, “the future of care delivery depends on automation of process.”
• Recently Congress passed legislation that could enable large hospital corporations to help smaller providers defray costs by allowing the free sharing of records and services.
• And, what some may consider surprising, the US Veteran’s Administration health care program is serving as a model for EMR implementation. A recent ABC news report claims that in study after study, the VA healthcare system has been rated as some of the best in the country when it comes to fewer errors, lower costs, effective treatments, and patient satisfaction. The reason for the change? According to some experts, EMR is credited as being the single most important factor.

While the long-term economic benefits seem obvious, the immediate investment is substantial and may need some incentive. A recent article on GovernmentHealthIT.com, points to some of the issues. As one hospital official puts it, “We’re not in a financial position such that we have dump trucks of money to fund electronic health records adoption for every physician on our medical staff.” And those physicians who are not directly employed by large hospital corporations, are often not motivated to spend dollars on an EMR system. John Glaser, vice president and chief information officer at Partners HealthCare System, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization that integrates academic hospitals with community health care centers says, “If I have $10,000 to invest and my choices are mutual funds or electronic medical records, mutual funds are a better bet for return on investment.”

A long-term return on investment isn’t just monetary. Another return might simply be increased patient confidence. More important might be a reduction in errors, as one group of physicians themselves recently found out. In November 2007 the AP reported that a conversation in a doctors-only Web forum revealed that medical charting errors have affected many physicians in the quality of their own health care.

Besides the costs, other concerns such as confidentiality and data security also slow the process. Privacy advocates and several other diverse groups including Gun Owners of America and the Family Research Council, among others, have formed the Coalition for Patient Privacy that calls for tighter controls to protect health information that goes beyond the HIPAA in the dawning of this electronic medical records era.

But while there certainly are concerns, I suspect the biggest obstacle is resistance to change, and that may just require more education as to the benefits that other industries have gleaned from this kind of enhanced automation and communication. Some organizations such as the Veteran’s Administration have done a good job overcoming these obstacles. If a large government body like the VA can do it quickly and efficiently, my hope is that hospital corporations and physicians’ offices can get there soon.

Source: This article originally appeared in DCLNews, January 2008. Subscribe to DCLNews.

In The Top Ten Mistakes of Web CMS Projects – and How to Avoid Them, Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting, shares what makes a project successful, and helps readers understand how to avoid the most common mistakes. Tips are provided to help you avoid the pitfalls and make the move to a WCMS less painful.

Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008 sponsor, Tedopres International, has produced a useful new resource, Technical Illustrations: New Efficient Ways to Visualise Your Product, a free, 113 page booklet designed to teach you on how to save cost on your translations and technical publications by using new and more efficient methods to create technical illustrations. It’s a high quality publication, packed with useful tips and tricks. Every technical communication professional should have a copy on their bookshelf.

Order yours today!

Author-it Software Corporation, a world leader in software for authoring, content management, publishing, website management and localization, has announced its participation as a platinum sponsor of Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008.

The Author-it suite is based on the philosophy of One Source, One Solution. This means that once content is created, the information can be easily shared across multiple documents and published to a wide range of different print, help, and web formats. Author-it is used today by more than 3000 customers in government, technology, commerce, healthcare, education and many other vertical industries.

Getting More Information About Author-it
To learn more about Author-it:

• Attend an upcoming webinar
• Discover client success stories and case studies
• Request a live demonstration
• Get a free trial
• Request a quote

Indiana Health Industry Forum (IHIF), a not-for-profit, private sector life sciences organization whose mission it is to create an environment where Indiana is a premier location for the creation and growth of health industry enterprises, has announced it will sponsor Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008.

IHIF is a membership organization that represents almost 200 companies and organizations involved in the life sciences in Indiana. It is the official Indiana affiliate of the Biotechnology Industry Organization and since 1994, has played an important role in the growth of the state’s life science economy, including driving passage of the 21st Century Research and Technology Fund, created in 1999 by the General Assembly to stimulate the process of diversifying the State’s economy by developing and commercializing advanced technologies in Indiana.

Interested in learning about life sciences firms in Indiana? Search Indiana Life Sciences Company Directory.

We’ve selected AirTran Airways as the official airline of Documentation and Training Life Sciences. The airline is a low-fare provider designed for business travelers, offering Business class, new planes with XM Satellite Radio and EasyFit Overhead Bins, assigned seats, and a frequent flier program. We’ve arranged to participate in AirTran Airways EventSavers program, which offers DocTrain attendees:

• A 10% discount on the best available AirTran one way fare
• Advanced seat assignments at time of booking
• No minimum stay length or Saturday overnight stay requirement
• Confirmed upgrade to Business Class, when available, for passengers booking “B” and “Y” fare levels
• One time waiver of Change Fee per reservation for any name or itinerary change (applicable fare increases will apply)
• A convenient toll-free reservation line that connects conference attendees to the EventSavers customer service desk
• Special EventSavers rates on rental cars from Hertz, just for being transferred to the hertz desk by the EventSaver customer service representative

Booking Your EventSavers Travel
Contact AirTran Airways EventSavers Reservations Desk at +1 866.683.8368. Use event code: IND062308.

Before You Book: Be Aware Of The Rules

• Attendees have the option of contacting the EventSavers reservations desk directly or they may book their reservations through their designated travel agency. However, to receive the 10% discount, both attendees and travel agents MUST contact AirTran Airways EventSavers Reservations Desk at +1 866.683.8368 and use event code: IND062308.
• Reservations booked on the internet DO NOT qualify.
• Reservations booked by travel agents that are not made directly with AirTran Airways EventSavers Reservations Desk DO NOT qualify.

Indy’s favorite diva, Brenda Williams, will be performing at the Documentation an Training Life Sciences networking cocktail reception, Tuesday evening, June 24, 2008 at Crowne Plaza Union Station from 5:30 - 7:00pm. Williams, a popular local talent, is a jazz vocalist who has opened for such musical greats as Ray Charles, Chuck Mangione, The Beach Boys, and Lee Greenwood.

What the media says about Williams

“Williams, no matter how you slice it, is the finest, jazziest, snazziest performer in town. I would travel anywhere to hear her sing.” Marion Garmel, The Indianapolis Star

“Brenda Williams can belt with the best of them, but maintains her own uniqueness as she lights up the stage whenever she appears. Williams is often sexy and saucy when she sings…but also poignantly reflective…” Nuvo Newsweekly

Listen to some of Brenda’s favorite tunes

If you’re interested in speaking at the online submission form (deadline December 20, 2007).

Before you submit, make sure you know what information is required to make a submission, as well as what we’re looking for (and what we’re not).