HSL develops Web site on health and disease

It is the first such community health resource information site in the country, and is expected to serve as a model for similar projects in communities throughout the United States.

The site can be reached at http://wings.buffalo.edu/wny/health/wnyh.html

The project was conceived by Sharon Gray, head of reference and education services in the Health Sciences Library; Robert O'Shea, emeritus associate professor in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, and John Loonsk, former director of the Office of Medical Computing in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

UB health-science librarians identified, collected and computerized pertinent health information, and Health Science Library staff maintain the site. All material available through the Web site can be accessed by the general public.

"It will be of particular use," Gray said, "to medical practitioners, administrators, researchers, policy-makers and students." She added that the Health Sciences Library continues to collect data and update the site.

"I estimate that we have about 90 percent of the known available citiations online already," Gray said, "and within a very short time, we will have, in this one place, a comprehensive compendium of all available studies related to the health care of the local population, including research produced privately, unpublished studies, agency reports and other materials."

O'Shea agreed that the new site will be an enormous boon to researchers, in particular, because it includes a broad range of reports, documents and databases previously scattered among many agencies, libraries and individuals.

"In addition to that, there are doctors here who still conduct research out of their offices-Buffalo may be unusual in that regard-and they have a considerable amount of information to contribute to this database.

"We're also now in a better position to retrieve and use 'lost' material that can serve as a baseline for further studies," O'Shea said. "For example, the Buffalo Health Study done here 30 years ago was literally forgotten until our department chair turned up a reference to it in some old office files.

"This kind of study is very important to epidemiologists, who are interested in long-range trends and comparative analyses," he noted. "These particular data are essential to any longitudinal study of changing rates of heart disease in this region.

"After hunting and hunting, the health study turned up in someone's garage in California," O'Shea reported. "This little anecdote indicates how very easy it is to lose this stuff and once it's gone, it can't be replicated. No comparison is possible."

O'Shea said that for users, the Web site offers a way of reviewing data that is much more economical in terms of time and money than previous methods. He pointed out that some material available will surprise users.

"The Web site will offer access to 'fugitive' reports and studies that originally had small circulation, were unpublished or had only an in-house circulation," he said. "Very few people would know about them. Some of the little-known research reports are in monograph form, and there is dissertation and thesis research available as well.

"This material has been generally difficult to get ahold of," O'Shea said. "That is, if you knew that it existed in the first place."

The Web site includes the following:

· The Western New York Health Database, more than 900 references to reports, theses, articles, statistical compilations and other materials related to the health of the population of the eight counties of Western New York: Allegany, Chautauqua, Cattaraugus, Erie, Genesee, Niagara, Orleans and Wyoming.

· Erie County Monthly Epidemiology Reports and the Wyoming County Department of Health 1996 Annual Report

· Full-text reports of the Health Systems Agency of Western New York

· Descriptions of archival collections in Western New York that contain current and historical information about the health of local populations.

Some examples of citations included in the database are: "The Lower West Side Health Needs Survey Report" produced by the UB Center for Urban Research in Primary Care, 1994; "Patterns of Mortality and Cancer Incidence Among the Seneca Nation of Indians, 1955-84," the 1988 doctoral dissertation of M.C. Mahoney; "Survey of Alcohol, Tobacco and Drug Use Among Ninth Grade Students, 1996, Erie County," produced by the Department of Cancer Control and Epidemiology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, 1997; Buffalo Physician and Biomedical Scientist, 1969-present, the magazine of the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and "Proud Vision: The History of the Buffalo General Hospital" by Evelyn Hawes (New York, Crowell, 1964).

The library is constantly developing new sources of medical information, expected to be available soon. Among those under development are:

· A directory database of health-care institutions, agencies and organizations in the eight Western New York counties. Hypertext links will connect the database to those institutions and agencies that have Web sites.

· Full texts of unpublished medical-history essays related to the health of the local population

· Information on data sets related to the health of the Western New York population. Full data sets will be linked to the Web site when possible.

"This raw data, including researchers' archival data, can serve as a baseline for comparisons," Gray said, emphasizing that the project is not limited to the UB medical school or libraries.

"Should other medical-school and health-sciences libraries (such as those at local research hospitals) undertake similar projects, we would want them linked to the UB Web site to produce an unparalleled local network of health-related information that would greatly facilitate research and health-care offerings nationwide."

The Web site project was funded by grants from the UB Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, the UB Primary Care Resource Center and the Regional Bibliographic Database Program of the Western New York Library Resources Council.

Assisting in the project at UB were Karen Buchinger, Celeste Neyerlin and Mary E. Petty.

Other participants include James Gerland, associate director of the UB Department of Computing and Information Technology; Wentsing Liu, director of the A.H. Aaron Library in Buffalo General Hospital; Marty Mutka, director of the Library Consortium of Health Institutions in Buffalo, and Suzanne Wilson of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.