Txt Msg: Don't 4get Your Meds!

Silverchair software developers donated their time and abilities recently to build a text messaging scheduling application to support a treatment adherence study at the University of Virginia. The study used text messages to reach rural HIV patients and remind them to take their medications and come to upcoming office visits. The study designers at UVA believe that automated text message reminders will keep rural patients on their treatment regimens more effectively than without them.

The system, known as STeM (Silverchair Text Messaging System), allows study coordinators to load in the cell phone number of new patients, schedule regular messages on a weekly calendar, schedule one-time messages, and report on messages sent.

The Charlottesville Daily Progress ran a story about the project on December 25th, 2008.

Exiting the Information Superhighway: Beware of Dead-Ends!

Saw a great post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog this week. (BTW, all scholarly publishers should subscribe to that blog -- it is timely, thought-provoking, and certainly challenges status quo thinking.) The post was written by Joseph Esposito and titled "Downloads As Failure." Read it here.


The gist of the post was that no publisher should brag about the number of PDF downloads from their site, as it signals that users are leaving a potentially rich, interconnected scholarly environment to experience an isolated one. And that's not good for users OR authors! As Joseph puts it:

When you say that your PDF downloads are up, you are acknowledging that your Web service facilitates a high degree of offline viewing. This in turn means that your service is not fully, even relentlessly, integrated into the ongoing communications medium that is the Internet today.

The "disconnectedness" problem Joseph highlights aligns with Silverchair's semantic philosophy -- information that is connected (to primary research, guidelines, commentaries, clinical trials, secondary literature, evidence ratings, educational materials, audio/video, etc.) is more valuable than information that is disconnected.


Silverchair connects health content on our platforms to all of the sources above through semantic indexing. We use terminology that is compatible with the UMLS to ensure our content is speaking the lingua franca of connected medicine. We consult with authors and publishers to understand what complementary content would add the most value to their readers and use semantics to target the most contextually relevant sections from those sources. This connectness has greatly increased the number and volume of referrers to content on our platforms -- which makes both publishers and authors happy.

In his final note, Joseph writes about how this connectedness will become a decision point for many authors when they choose publishers for their content. He writes:

Authors, however, will increasingly evaluate publishers by asking, "How many people are in your IT department? What is your overall IT budget? What is your roadmap for technological development? May I speak to your CTO as well as your editor-in-chief?"

Gee, I couldn't have put it better myself. Let's talk!

Jake Zarnegar, CTO

E-Content Magazine: Semantics Spotlight

The October 2008 issue of E-Content magazine (subscription required) has multiple stories on semantics and the semantic web. Featured stories include "Content Delivery Rides the Semantic Wave" and "How Semantic Tagging Increases Findability."

A quote from Silverchair's CTO Jake Zarnegar provided the conclusion for the latter article:

Silverchair's Zarnegar put it well: "Semantic tagging is best applied in areas when there is a qualitative 'best answer' to a user query (as opposed to a 'most popular' answer)...If you look at industries where semantic tagging (and structured data) have found a foothold (aviation, medicine, genetics, chemistry, and others) you'll see they are not areas where you want to go too far with iffy
information!"

These articles are great reads on the emergence of semantics.

E-books vs. Print Books

We have watched with great interest the rise of e-books and the impact that the future of this technology has on the traditional book market. As with most technological debates, there is hyperbole on both sides. But there is a great article by Sara Nelson in Publisher's Weekly that points out that this doesn't have to be an either/or conversation between e-books and traditional books. When looked at properly, it is probably more an "and" conversation, with e-books filling a role when appropriate, but not supplanting print books entirely. This perspective offers some sanity to a debate that may, as it is currently framed, not even be real.

EMR Survey Shows Slow Adoption

Despite all the benefits of Electronic Medical Records, most physicians have not yet taken the plunge because of one thing -- cost. These results were found in a recent survey by the New England Journal of Medicine, summarized here.

The survey reports that only one in 5 (20%) of our nation's doctors use an EMR, with the main reason given for the slow adoption being cost. Especially for small physician offices, the costs of implementation are proving a barrier to entry, at least for now.

The good news? For those doctors who have adopted an EMR, the results are positive, offering such things as increased efficiency and more space to be used for patient care.

The survey was supported by the Health Information Technology branch of the Department of Health and Human Services.

eContent Article recaps SSP

There's a nice article in EContent summarizing the recent Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting in Boston, including a mention of Silverchair CTO Jake Zarnegar, who kicked off a pre-meeting seminar entitled "Say What You Mean: How Semantic Tagging Makes Content More Discoverable, More Useful, and More Valuable."

The article is a good summary of events at the SSP meeting for those who did not get a chance to attend, or a good refresher for those who were there.

Google Health explained

Google recently launched the beta version of Google Health, and although some are questioning whether medical records will be truly secure on the site, it represents a significant step forward in the digitization of health information. Check out this well-written article that describes the service in detail, including Google's push to release APIs to try to lasso in a tangled web of medical record content.