Information On WNY Health And Disease Available At New Web Site

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo Health Sciences Library has developed the Western New York Health Resources Web site to serve as a single source for current and historic information and documents on health and disease in Western New York.

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 UB Health Sciences Library (HSL); Robert O'Shea, Ph.D., emeritus associate professor in the UB Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, and John Loonsk, M.D., former director of the Office of Medical Computing in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

UB health-science librarians identified, collected and computerized pertinent health information. HSL staff maintain the site. All material available through the Web site can be accessed by the general public. 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 UB Health Sciences Library continues to collect data and update the site.

"I estimate that we have about 90 percent of the known available citations 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of all available studies related to the health care of the local population, including research produced privately, unpublished studies, agency reports and other materials."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, 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 the researcher'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 longitudinal comparison of data 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 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.

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, and Buffalo Physician and Biomedical Scientist, 1969-present, the magazine of the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

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.

• 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.