Chair’s Message
The Florida Consumer Health Information Network continues its work to explore the goals set out in the NN/LM planning award.
Of special note at this time is our partnership with the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and its advisory council on consumer health information (State Consumer Health Information and Policy Advisory Council). AHCA unveiled a new consumer health portal, FloridaHealthFinder.gov, in November 2007. At the December 4 meeting of the Advisory Council, Mark Flynn was asked to speak about currently available consumer health information resources licensed by the Florida Electronic Library and Barbara Shearer was asked to talk about the FCHIN. The presentations were well received by the Council and the following was reported in the draft minutes currently posted to the Council’s meeting website:
Presentation: Florida Electronic Library – Karen van Caulil introduced Mark Flynn, Library Program Administrator for the State Library and Archives of Florida, and Ms. Barbara Shearer, Director of the Charlotte Edwards Maguire Medical Library, College of Medicine at Florida State University. Mr. Flynn provided the members with a presentation on the Florida Health Information Network and the Florida Electronic Library and recent efforts to provide health information, along with a variety of other information, to Florida’s citizens through the use of the statewide library network. Ms. Shearer provided an overview of the long range plan of the steering committee which includes focusing on outreach and other coordination of information for public and professional use. It was explained that it is the desire of the Florida Electronic Library to pursue avenues of collaboration with the Advisory Council to provide better information to citizens who are seeking answers to health questions beyond a simple definition.
Mr. Flynn explained that the initiative began when trying to empower librarians to be able to provide information that was vetted, accurate and up to date. An infrastructure was put into place that allowed any user to access through any public library in the state simply by entering their library card information. Ms. Shearer stated that the committee would review the Council’s current strategic plan to determine if there were areas where the two groups could collaborate. She informed the members that it is the steering committee’s feeling that there could be a way to offer the medical information, articles and research that are available through the FEL by developing seamless coordination of information for both the public and the medical professional. Secretary Agwunobi thanked both Mr. Flynn and Ms. Shearer for the informative presentation and vowed to commit the Agency to working with them to explore possible levels of collaboration as quickly as possible.
AHCA TASK: Work with Florida Electronic Library and its steering committee to determine possible avenues of collaboration for the expansion and enhancement of the current website as quickly as possible.
[Note: The agenda and minutes are posted at the following website: http://ahca.myflorida.com/SCHS/chismeetings_2007.shtml]
On December 10, at the face-to-face meeting of the FCHIN steering committee held in Orlando, the FCHIN welcomed Dr. Karen L. van Caulil, Chair of the Public Relations Workgroup charged with marketing and training for FloridaHealthFinder.gov, for a discussion of ways the Advisory Council and its workgroups could collaborate with FCHIN. Action items from this December 10 meeting included sending names of FCHIN steering committee volunteers interested in working on both the Public Relations Workgroup and the Website Workgroup to Beth Eastman, Interim Bureau Chief, Florida Center for Health Information and Policy. As a result, Kaye Robertson and Pat Clark were asked to serve on the Public Relations Workgroup and Mark Flynn was asked to serve on the Web-site workgroup, and several interested parties were selected. To clarify, interested parties may serve as proxies for the Workgroup members and are included in an e-mail distribution list so they are kept abreast of workgroup activities. FCHIN members on the interested parties list are Beverly Shattuck, Nancy Teger, Allison Howard and Barbara Shearer.
At the request of Beth Eastman, FCHIN was asked to present at the January 29, 2008, Public Relations Workgroup meeting. Barbara Shearer made the presentation and Debra Flemming, Web Manager for the State Library and Archives, assisted in answering questions about the Florida Electronic Library. Several action items resulted from the Workgroup meeting specific to marketing and training users to access the FloridaHealthFinder.gov website. There is great interest by AHCA in working with the Florida Electronic Library, the public library community and FCHIN to develop and deliver both marketing and training to Florida citizens. This is just the beginning of a new partnership between AHCA and the library community in Florida. We will provide updates as work progresses. Please contact Barbara Shearer at 850-644-8970 or via e-mail at Barbara.Shearer@med.fsu.edu for any questions or suggestions.