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Center Party
-From left, Sarah Donaldson, associate director of the Clinical Cancer Center and professor of radiation oncology; Eugene Bauer, vice president of Stanford University Medical Center; and Larry Horton, the university's director of government relations, celebrated at a July 20 reception the recent approval of plans to build a comprehensive cancer facility on Blake Wilbur Drive. University and Medical Center officials were jubilant following the Palo Alto City Council's unanimous vote in July that gave the go-ahead for construction of the $117 million Center for Cancer Treatment and Prevention/Ambulatory Care Pavilion.
The university's first Stanford-branded Internet spin-off, called e-SKOLAR, allows physicians across the country to perform the rapid searches across multiple medical references that have been popular with Stanford clinicians for several years.
And in the next few months, physicians everywhere will have the opportunity to earn continuing medical education credits through use of e-SKOLAR.
Stanford-affiliated physicians currently have access to most of the functions of the new product's features through the Stanford Health Information Network for Education, or SHINE.
"e-SKOLAR has provided us with a great opportunity to respond to the needs of physicians worldwide," said Eugene Bauer, vice president for Stanford University Medical Center and dean of Stanford University School of Medicine. "We believe the service will significantly raise the bar of medical practice by bringing one-click knowledge to the point of care."
"The knowledge service provider model gives us the chance to realize the true potential of the Web to link knowledge users and knowledge creators in a mediated system that extends the University from a training resource to a sustaining resource," said Paul Lippe, CEO of e-SKOLAR. "Addressing important challenges, such as improving medical care, by leveraging the Web, can do good while creating a very good business."
With the formation of e-SKOLAR, the service will no longer be restricted to the Stanford community. Any physician or medical group can subscribe to Stanford SKOLAR, M.D. for an annual fee of $240 per user.
Stanford's School of Medicine will actively support e-SKOLAR with a combination of technology transfer, content collaboration and oversight.
The combination of e-SKOLAR's fast, cross-referenced searches of textbooks, medical journals, drug databases and clinical guidelines, coupled with the opportunity for physicians to learn and earn CME credit online will form the basis of a unique Internet-based service known as Stanford SKOLAR, M.D.
"Stanford SKOLAR, M.D. represents a new category of integrated knowledge environment for medical professionals," said Phyllis Gardner, senior associate dean for education and student services at the medical school. "It combines the immediacy and reach of the Web with the depth and commitment to quality of an academic medical center."
Stanford SKOLAR, M.D. evolved out of SHINE. Over the last four years, SHINE was developed by Ken Melmon, associate dean for postgraduate medical education, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of faculty members and students from the schools of computer science and medicine. The team used a query language processor and a specially developed knowledge management system to enable efficient searches across multiple, heterogeneous information sources.
SKOLAR, M.D. has become an essential resource for Stanford physicians seeking to stay abreast of the exponentially increasing amount of medical information available in textbooks, journal articles, drug databases and updated clinical guidelines. By entering an unstructured query, a clinician can pull up disease or symptom information ranging from basic definitions to drug dosage schedules for patients with complicating factors such as pregnancy or a secondary illness. Stanford physicians currently use the service to supplement their clinical decision making.
"We have found that Stanford clinicians are actually using the system in the presence of their patients, indicating a very high degree of confidence in the information and how it is presented," Melmon said. "We have also found that clinicians who leave Stanford continue to request access to the service. Once physicians have experienced having this level of information at their fingertips, they are unwilling to accept less."
e-SKOLAR's first distribution partner will be Agilent Technologies Inc., which will incorporate SKOLAR in a new generation of Internet-enabled medical product devices.
The widespread demand for real-time access to clinically relevant information was confirmed by a recent survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. In the study, 74 percent of physicians surveyed described Stanford SKOLAR, M.D. as "very useful" and more than 50 percent indicated they would use the service at least once a day.
e-SKOLAR currently is run by a 17-member team. Among them is Lippe, who joined e-SKOLAR as CEO from a post of senior vice president of business and market development at Synopsys; Ken Melmon, MD, chief medical officer; Jonny Goldman, vice president of research and development (formerly vice president of research and development at BitSource); Rose Vasquez, MD, MBA, vice president of medical affairs (formerly vice president and medical director at CIGNA Healthcare of Northern California); and Sue Sweeney, vice president of sales and marketing (formerly vice president at Data General and COO at Trace Software).
Members of the Stanford community may gain immediate access to most e-SKOLAR functions through the current SHINE program by visiting SHINE'S Web site (www.shine.stanford. edu) and selecting "Registration." All requests for access are reviewed by Lane Medical Library staff who reply via e-mail to the requestor.
Stanford SKOLAR M.D., with the search capabilities of SHINE and added
functions such as access to CME credits and enhanced content, is expected
to be released in middle to late summer. Physicians who want the full
Stanford SKOLAR M.D. package should send an e-mail to information@skolar.com
for subscription information prior to release.
