<i>Library Update</i>

Health Misinformation and Predatory Publishing

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
~ Mark Twain*

In today’s information landscape, including social media with its commercialization and polarization, many people struggle with discerning the truth.  A 2023 survey from KFF revealed half to three-quarters of the public feel uncertain about public health topics (e.g. Covid-19 vaccines, reproductive health, and gun violence), which leaves them vulnerable to misinformation but is also the opportunity to combat it.
 
In response, Library Services created a Health Misinformation Resource guide complete with reputable tips and recommendations to verify and evaluate health information.  Resources from the National Library of Medicine, the National Institute of Health, and the U.S. Surgeon General, including a quick infographic for How to Spot Fake News can help individuals ask the right questions before making an assessment.

In addition, predatory publishing is an increasing threat to researchers. Library Services created a Predatory Publishing guide to identify red flags of predatory journals and quality indicators for open-access journals.  Library Services recommends the checklist tool Think, Check, Submit to assess whether a publication suits your research.

*Fun fact: Mark Twain never wrote this statement. 

Long COVID Resources

A recent data brief from JAMA provided striking data points on the continuing influence of the COVID pandemic:   7% of US adults have experienced Long COVID. Among the interesting findings, data behind the national survey found the prevalence of long Covid was significantly higher among women, white, and Asian populations compared to men and African American populations.  
Did you know Library Services can help provide access to resources for caring for patients and to the latest research in this area, which continues to evolve?

Here are a few notable resources: 

MN Department of Health:  Long COVID - Links to resources and support for patients, interim guidance for providers, as well as the state’s Guiding Council composed of Minnesota clinicians who care for long COVID patients in primary and specialty care settings across the state. 

Roger Chou, Eric Herman, Azrah Ahmed, et al. Long COVID Definitions and Models of Care: A Scoping Review. Ann Intern Med. [Epub 21 May 2024].

National Academies Press ebook on Long COVID (2022)

NIH RECOVER COVID Initiative

PubMed search on Long COVID 

Allina’s recommendations

Have a Happy and Safe 4th of July!

Summer Leadership Reading

Welcome to Summer! With the sun shining from early morning until late at night, you might find yourself looking for something to read. These long days can mean more time for a new novel from your public library (see the April issue for more info), or perhaps you’d like to use this time for personal development such as building your leadership skills. We’ve got just the thing for you! Starting in May, Library Services began to curate a Leadership in the Literature list of recent leadership and management articles that will appear monthly in the Management Minute (sent to all Allina supervisors or higher). Even if you do not receive the Management Minute, you can access them right from our website on the Leadership Resources subject guide. For May, we had articles on everything from being an inclusive leader to getting past burnout to supporting a culture of care. Check back mid-June for a new list of articles.

Curated Content Collections: Library Subject Guides

What does a library within a library look like?  Check out the Library’s Subject Guides accessible from the top navigation of the Library web page.

The latest Guide to be added is Cardiology, but there are Guides on Health Data & Statistics, Leadership, Nursing, and much more.  Each Guide highlights and provides links to the library content, ebooks, ejournals, documents, guidelines, websites, and videos that relate to the subject topic. Keep an eye on the list because the librarians are adding new ones on a regular basis.  We also welcome suggestions for your favorite Guide.

Pride Month Resources

Library Services wishes you a happy Pride Month! Please check out the LGBTQIA2S+ and Transgender healthcare pages of our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging subject guide. These pages feature our collection of LGBTQIA2S+ eBook titles, as well as links further reading to authoritative sources on LGBTQIA2S+ healthcare, professional society guidelines , and videos. If you are interested in learning more about LGBTQIA2S+ Healthcare and earning free CMEs at the same time, check out the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center. There are also many ways to celebrate Pride locally, there are curated lists of fiction and non-fiction titles from Hennepin County Library, Quatrefoil Library in South Minneapolis, and don’t forget TCPride.

Exciting New Library Tools Available

Happy May! We’ve returned from our newsletter spring break with several new tools to tell you about!

UpToDate

UpToDate, one of our primary clinical and drug information point of care tools now has two new features: Lab Interpretations and UpToDate Pathways. UpToDate Pathways are interactive guides that support clinical decision-making on 79 different topics. In cases where abnormal lab results may raise questions, Lab Interpretation monographs enable you to more quickly and accurately interpret and decide on next steps. Access UptoDate from our website or directly from Excellian.

Clinical Skills

Clinical Skills is our longstanding tool for keeping up on nursing skills and procedures, but unfortunately, until now, there wasn’t a way to get and save CE credit from the tool. Now all nurses, nursing and medical assistants, and respiratory therapists should automatically have Clinical Skills accounts set up which allows you to complete and save CE. To find out more about logging in and self-assigning courses see our guide.

Need More Help?

Allina Library Services is always looking for new ways to support your complex information needs. We’ve added two new resources available on our website. You now can Request a Librarian Consultation anytime you’d like to discuss your information needs. We’ve also developed several guides to help you use our resources on your own. They are available in the new How-to-Guides section of our website.  

Pros and Cons of AI: the Medical Librarians Perspective

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) poses opportunities and challenges for healthcare professionals.  Copilot, Microsoft’s new AI assistant for Windows 11 and Edge recently became available for all Allina Health employees, which features relevant and creative suggestions, insights, and tips for writing documents, planning projects, and research information for nearly any topic.  The applications present exciting time-saving resources for professionals; however, our findings have shown significant limitations of AI tools.

For instance, our initial experiences have revealed AI provided limited context in answering complex questions.  While algorithms are continuously improving, many AI models initially offered older or outdated, or incorrect information.  AI learns from feedback and experience over time, and the data is only as good as the input.  AI models insufficiently trained in certain areas may hallucinate data –presenting information that appears to be real and valid, but essentially is nonexistent. 

Further analysis suggests AI algorithms do not exist neutrally or objectively.  Numerous concerned researchers, including scientists from NEJM and NLM have raised red flags that AI algorithms reflect bias within social systems, especially in medicine.  Inequities that persist in social realities such as race, sex, gender, disability status and other factors are often embedded in large language models for medical machine learning systems.  These inequities endure as social underpinnings of algorithmic systems that cement discriminatory decisions in code.

The bottom line is AI models provide convenient and innovative solutions around the workplace, but the scope, relevancy, and underlying biases of AI systems are significant issues that will require long-term evaluation.   

Spring Break!

Happy April! The newsletter is on spring break! In case you need some spring break resources, check out your public library for free access to e-books that you likely can download right to your device! If you have a library card for a metro area library system, you can access e-books using the MELSA website or your local library website. 

Did you know that every resident has access to a large collection of resources, including e-books through eLibraryMN? Check out your tax dollars at work! No need for a library card to access these resources.  

If you’re working over spring break this year, don’t forget about the Allina Library Services website and feel free to contact us for articles or literature searches – we’ll be working from the beach 😊 

Do you want to learn more about Library Services?

Happy March! I think the groundhog was right about spring! This last month we’ve been happy to meet with several groups to talk about library services and how we can support work across the organization. Recently, we met with the Nursing Executive Leadership Council, the Nursing Advisory Council, ANW’s Evidence Based Practice Clinical Scholars, the Research Personnel Forum,  the latest cohort of ANW Medical Students, and several leaders in ambulatory nursing. We also have the privilege of serving as members of the Dementia Work Group and the Nurse Practice Leader Council. We’re happy to meet with workgroups, teams, or any other group or individual to present on a number of topics such as using our databases, searching for articles, evaluating resources, and using citation management software. We are also happy to just sit down with a group or individual and walk them through a hands-on search using our tools. Lastly, if you have an ongoing need for our support, we’re happy to join your group on a regular basis. If you’d like to have us meet with you, please reach out at library@allina.com

Staying Current

Want an easier solution to stay informed? Do you want the latest updates in your specialty, but don’t want to dig around to find them? Now we have a subject guide with numerous methods to stay up-to-date with journal articles, expert summaries, practice changing updates and clinical news. Visit our Ways to Stay Informed subject guide for links and instructions to have tailored updates pushed out to your email

Call for Books

Did you know that the library at Abbott Northwestern has a little library of free fiction and nonfiction books for patients and their family members? We are starting to run low on books and could use your help! If you have any gently used paperback or hardcover titles that you would be willing to part with, we would put them to good use. We are currently very low on mysteries and romance titles but are accepting all donations.

If you live near Abbott Northwestern or work at Commons, feel free to drop off titles anytime when we are staffed (Monday - Friday 9 am - 3 pm), or any time during your shift if you work at Abbott Northwestern (all ANW employees have badge access to enter the library, and set the books at the front desk.) Non-clinical books only, please.

Library Services Annual Report

We hope that your 2024 is off to a great start. We’ve been very busy at the library answering your questions, finding articles, conducting literature searches, and negotiating with our vendors to provide the best, most cost-effective resources. We also have started our 2024 strategic planning and have goals to increase awareness about our resources while improving access. As we look to the future, we also reflect on all the work that we did over the last year.  Our 2023 Library Services Annual Report is a good summary of that work and we are happy to share it with you. Have a great February!

Track Your Favorite Journals in BrowZine Bookshelf 

The Allina Health Library is excited to spread the word on the new feature in BrowZine, the Library’s ejournal portal, called My Bookshelf.  

My Bookshelf is the area within BrowZine where you can organize your favorite journals so the current issue is one click away.  To access, you simply need to create an account for yourself, with your email and password of your choosing.  The sign-up page can be accessed by clicking on “My Bookshelf” at the top of the Browzine screen and following the link to create an account.  You will need to select Allina Health as the institution.  You can accept to receive email alerts when new articles are available. 

For a quick 2-minute tour through this new feature in Browzine, view the new video:  

For questions on this and any library resources, email us at library@allina.com. 

Black History Month

This month we would like to highlight Joel Bervell, a Ghanaian-American medical student, social media star, medical educator, and host of "The Dose" podcast with the Commonwealth Fund. In the social media sphere Joel is known as the "Medical Mythbuster", He is committed to fighting health disparities in medicine through education and regularly posts about racial disparities, the hidden history of medicine, and biases in healthcare. Joel is currently participating in the White House Office of Public Engagement’s Healthcare Leaders in Social Media Roundtable, on the Council for Responsible Social Media, served as the American Medical Association’s Medical Student Digital Fellow. Please check out this short video biography of him from Scientific American.

Welcome to the new year!

As we look forward to the year ahead, it’s fun to also look back at what we’ve accomplished during the past year. We’ve been busy at the library, which reflects how busy all of you have been as well! Both literature search and article delivery requests are up this year! 

For those of you who access your articles directly from our subscriptions, below are the top 5 accessed journal subscriptions in 2023: 

1. New England Journal of Medicine
2. Circulation 
3. Journal of the American Medical Association 
4. NEJM Journal Watch
5. Stroke

We’ll work to deliver a fuller picture of our usage and accomplishments in our annual report - watch for it in February.  We wish you the very best in this new year and we thank you for your continued patronage.  

Allina Health Library's eBooks: ready when you are

• Allina's eBooks are over 900 digital versions of clinical textbooks or other health-related books that you can read on your computer, tablet, and in some cases a smartphone.  

• The Library has 6 major platforms for eBooks:  R2Library, Proquest Ebook Central, EBSCOHost eBooks, Access Medicine, Books@OVID, and TDSHealth.  There are also some freely accessible eBooks in the catalog. 

• To learn which platform has mobile, app, and/or remote access, check the mobile and desktop chart.

How do I access:

• All the eBooks are easily accessible from the Library’s catalog (see the graphic above for both places on the Library’s homepage) when you are on the Allina network.  In some cases, creating a personal account will allow you to access the ebook remotely.
• Once you find the book in the catalog, click on the Title Access link:
• Allina's eBooks are interactive and customizable. Depending on the platform, you can save references, bookmarks, and more.
• For the most part, Allina eBooks are not downloadable to an e-reader.
• Many eBooks are highlighted on our Subject Guides as well.

Contact us with questions or suggestions for new titles

Popular Articles in 2023

Every year at this time, the JAMA Network compiles its most viewed and discussed journal articles, as well as its top video and audio recordings of 2023. This year there were topics on Ivermectin for COVID-19, the new anti-amyloid-β monoclonal antibody (MAb) treatments for dementia, weight loss drugs for obesity, and more. In addition to the most viewed, the most discussed articles are sorted based on activity in news, blog sites, social media platforms, and more.  Finally, the top audio and videos (including procedural videos) are available and include discussions of AI/LLM chatbots, SSI prevention, management of diabetes, and much more. 
 
Visit the Best of the JAMA Network and be sure to visit the most viewed in JAMA’s specialties.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - an ongoing commitment

Allina Health Library Services is committed to fostering a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion within our organization and the communities we serve. We recognize that libraries have a responsibility to challenge systemic oppression and promote social justice in our society and within healthcare. As a part of that work, we continue to build our collections and curate resources with health equity in mind. We are excited to announce that in addition to our existing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging resource guide, we are adding a Health Equity page to several of our existing Subject Guides linked from our homepage. Check out our Anesthesia Health Equity page where we’ve shared relevant professional statements, articles and videos. We plan to add similar sections on our other pages and would love your help. Please let us know if you have suggestions by emailing us at library@allina.com We hope these resources will help inform health equity-based practices across Allina Health. 

Introducing Proximity Searching in PubMed

Have you ever searched PubMed where keywords or phrases just weren’t cutting it?  Now you can search for multiple terms appearing in any order with a specified distance of one another in the Title and/or Abstract fields. For example, to try a search in PubMed for citations where the terms “neck” and “pain” appear with no more than two words between them in the Title/Abstract search field, search: 
“neck pain”[Title/Abstract:~2]. Search results will include neck pain, neck-related pain, neck-back pain, neck and back pain, neck/shoulder pain, neck and shoulder pain, pain in neck, neck muscle pain and more.

See the PubMed User Guide and view the proximity searching tutorial for more examples and information about searching in PubMed.

Did you know?

Did you know The British Medical Journal (BMJ) publishes a special Christmas issue every year. This issue features a collection of light-hearted and humorous articles and original research papers. The Christmas issue is known for its unconventional and entertaining content, covering a wide range of topics, from the science of Christmas to the health benefits of holiday traditions. The Christmas issue comes out right in time for Christmas, so be sure to watch out for this year's issue! 

Here are some of our librarians' favorite stories from years past: I tried to survive as a Doctor in The Sims 4, Anticipating the ageing trajectories of superheroes in the Marvel cinematic universe and Golf habits among physicians and surgeons: observational cohort study. 

Survey Results

In September 2023, Allina Health Library Services asked our customers about their experience with Library Services, as well as the impact of the library on their work. We contacted around 1000 customers who had used one of our services in the past 18 months and we were happy to receive 227 survey responses from a variety of different people. Overall, it was clear that the library is a well-loved service that provides a high level of expertise and access. Library Services received an overall rating of 4.72/5 stars! Additionally, a very high number of respondents agreed that we have an impact on patient care, research, and business processes. 

While the overall results we very positive, the survey did indicate some issues around barriers to access including the need for further education, additional resources, and more communication around our services. We will be working on addressing this feedback while continuing to provide robust services and resources. 

We encourage you to read our survey results online: 2023 Impact Survey

Tip of the Month 

Do you like to get something for nothing?  One of the best deals around is to create a free My NCBI account in PubMed and start taking advantage of all the things it can do for you immediately.  

What is My NCBI? 

In the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information own words “My NCBI” is a tool that retains user information and database preferences to provide customized services for many NCBI databases [most notably PubMed]. It allows you to save searches, select display formats, filtering options, and set up automatic searches that are sent by e-mail. If you publish government-sponsored research, you also can use it to manage your publication history and make sure you are in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy (My Bibliography).  

Steps to create an account 

1. Make sure your browser will accept cookies and allow pop-ups from NCBI web pages. 

2. Go to Pubmed.gov and click Log in in the upper right corner

3. Since June 2021, NCBI requires that you use a username and password associated with a partner organization, such as a Google, Login.gov or an ORCiD account. You only need to connect your account once and then a cookie will remember you going forward on the same computer.  NCBI has additional explanation here.  The Library can help answer questions on this process too!   

Once you have an account, you can save searches, collections of articles, preferred filters, and also create a My Bibliography of your own publications.  These are all options under the Send to link. 

Once you have saved or created preferences, you access all of these by clicking your username in the upper right corner to go to your dashboard.  You will also now see the options to create an alert or RSS feed based on a search you have created – a great way to receive regular updates on a topic or a favorite journal! 

Native American Heritage Month

The youngest Aboriginal (Cree-Saulteaux) graduate from the Facility of Medicine in Manitoba at the age of 24 Dr. Anderson DeCoteau, is the youngest president of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada (IPAC). Dr. Anderson DeCoteau works in predominantly administrative/ policy/ planning type roles. She strives to ground mainstream systems approaches to Indigenous health in Indigenous rights, and Indigenous understandings and teachings around health, being healthy, and healing which sometimes requires challenging definitions of science and evidence. She designed a research project that helped facilitate an elective and compensate the healers for the time spent teaching medical students a traditional aboriginal medical elective. She recognized the importance of Indigenous knowledge and traditional healing practices in improving patient care. Her leadership spawned the development of a series of tools to be incorporated into the curriculum of medical schools across Canada. All projects had a common goal: to provide medical students with an understanding of the expansive list of barriers that prevent Aboriginal people from enjoying a good quality of life.

Welcome

Welcome to the new Library Services Library Update and Happy National Medical Librarians Month (October)! I’m excited to introduce myself and tell you a little bit about what we hope to do with this update. I am the new Library Services Manager after the former, well-loved manager Jim Bulger retired. While I have big shoes to fill, I have a great staff that continues to provide excellent, timely resources and services. This was confirmed in our recent survey where we received a 4.72 (out of 5) average rating from over 220 respondents! I’m looking forward to sharing more of our survey in our next Library Update which will go out on a roughly monthly basis. This new communication tool is a way for us to share new resources, tools, tips, and tricks that will help you get what you need more easily. If you haven’t already, you will need to subscribe by entering your email under the subscribe box above this post. We look forward to continuing to serve your information needs!  

-Carissa Tomlinson, MLIS, Library Services Manager, carissa.tomlinson@allina.com 

Tip of the Month

Are you interested in one-click access to millions of full-text clinical and scholarly articles?

LibKey Nomad is a browser extension providing instant links to full-text journal articles subscribed by Allina Health and Open Access sources. This tool is available for Allina affiliates. LibKey Nomad utilizes the swiftest pathway to connect you across numerous publishers, vendors, and other platforms.  LibKey Nomad supports popular research sites such as PubMed, UpToDate, Micromedex, Google Scholar, and even Wikipedia. Download the tool here https://thirdiron.com/downloadnomad/

After installation, select “Allina Health” as your affiliated institution. Proceed to research and enjoy embedded LibKey Nomad links wherever you may roam. (see example at right)

Hispanic Heritage Month September 15-October 15

To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, we would like to spotlight Doña Dolores “Lola” Chávez de Armijo. Born in 1859 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she was the first woman and first Hispanic woman to hold state office in New Mexico as the State Librarian. In 1912, the first governor of New Mexico, William C. McDonald, attempted to have her removed from office stating that because she was a woman, she was unfit to hold appointed office under New Mexico's constitution. Chávez de Armijo filed suit against the governor for gender discrimination, which made it all the way to the New Mexico Supreme Court, which she won. She was able to keep her job, and this led to the passage of legislation in 1913 allowing women to hold seats of appointed office.