~Alisha

I’m still in library school and still figuring out what my niche will be within health sciences. But I like your point about aligning yourself with your institution’s activities. I have heard this before. I visited a medical library a few months ago, and the librarians were telling me how they have changed some of their outreach efforts in order to participate more with the hospital’s activities. Like you said, they did not want to over-commit themselves, and they also wanted their energy to go towards those services that are most important to their institution’s current goals.

I’m looking forward to reading your perspective on this Medlib-L discussion.

I was excited to get the sticky notes translated into a visual document (it looked like engineering schematics when I finished) and that it was highly received by my team mates on the order set committee. I think the best thing that has helped me is pitching in anytime they need help even if it means I stay late. It has showed I am part of the team and right there in the thick of it with them. Of course, we always have to remember there is a such a thing as too much work.

It is great that you have access to your hospital’s EMR and are working on integrating MedlinePlus Connect. I know how hard it is to get physicians into the library to train. I did have some success with this when we were training on part of the new EMR system, but it was mostly the physicians I knew very well who came to the library for a demonstration. I would suggest you see about demonstrating the system in the physician’s lounge (if your hospital has one). This is normally a big success and even if you do not train many physicians you will at least get to see several!

Now with order sets, if your hospital has Zynx or Provation then you probably will not have many requests. If your hospital does not then I would highly suggest seeing if there is a committee over the order sets and trying to get permission to attend the meetings. Normally if you tell them you can save them time by you doing the searches for them, they are eager to invite you to every meeting

I will be posting here soon about some more upcoming training experience and order set development.

I’m working on getting involved in our EMR, and you’ve given me lots of ideas. I was trained a bit on the physicians’ and nurses’ portals (we use Epic and have since our brand new hospital opened, and the rest of the system is in the process of switching). The hope was that the clinicians would come in and practice on the computers here and I’d be available to help them. That hasn’t really happened, but I consider it my foot in the door. I’m also doing what I can to support our systems/business analyst librarian, who is working on getting MedlinePlus Connect integrated. And last but not least, we were able to push for our own portal to go in and chart when we provide patients with information, to support meaningful use of the EHR. No order set work yet, but I’m pretty sure some of my recent research requests were somewhat related, so I’m going to keep that foot in and see if at some point I can push it a bit wider! There are some challenges since I’m only at this one smaller community hospital (also supporting several clinics and other medical services in the area), but I know my colleagues at some of the larger, urban hospitals are also interested in this, so we’ll see what happens!

Keep up the great work, and happy new year!