Top Ten Reasons to Use Your Library (whether or not you are involved in direct patient care)

Number Ten: You will get valuable information to help you make decisions.
Number Nine: You will get more accurate information.
Number Eight: You will make better decisions.
Number Seven: You will save time.
Number Six: You will be more productive.
Number Five: You will get your work done.
Number Four: You will do better work.
Number Three: You might even become a “fast-tracker”.

Number Two: You will contribute to knowledge sharing within your organization.

You never know when the information you get for one project might be useful to a colleague working on a similar project. Let your librarians do the legwork. We can save you time and sharing the information you get could help a colleague avoid “reinventing the wheel”.

Please contact Michele (223-0340) or Margo (738-2325) for additional information or for help with your project.

Stay tuned for Reason Number One in a future blog post.

Source: Special Libraries Association

Health Care Reform 101

We’re starting to get questions like: "You know, I haven't really been following this whole thing in detail, but now.... are there any good summaries of the debate I could look at?"

Here are some good places to start :

New York Times Topics: Health Care Reform

Health Affairs: Fact vs Fiction

Health Affairs: Health Policy Brief Key Issues in Health Reform (PDF)

Kaiser Family Foundation : Health Reform

Comparison of Pending Health Care Bills

For those of you more visually oriented, try the series of "napkin" talks by Dan Roam - a noted speaker on visual presentation of info

They may not be best-sellers, but we are all hearing about the House bill, H.R. 3200: America’s Affordable Health Choices Act and the Senate bill, S. _: Affordable Health Choices Act, together more commonly known and debated as Health Care Reform. These two bills – 1000+ pages from the House and 600+ pages from the Senate - are generating plenty of discussion, but what is really in them? If you are looking for good, readable summaries in order to better understand these two plans, the following may help :

A summary of the S._: Affordable Health Choices Act was prepared and released by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on July 15. See the summary here (PDF).

Three House Committees: Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor prepared and released this summary of H.R. 3200: America’s Affordable Health Choices Act available here. This possibly more objective summary was prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The complete bills can be found here:
Final version of H.R. 3200
and draft version of S._

If you are interested in following the progression, Slate.com created this online guide to sources.

For an examination of how other countries manage their health care systems, check out this program from PBS :

Frontline: Sick Around the World
You can even watch it online.

Special thanks to Medlib-L for the above summary.

Business Databases Courtesy of Badgerlink

Badgerlink * offers several full-text research databases covering business management, marketing, trade, and industry journals, company profiles and news. The Ebsco Business Databases (Badgerlink) include the following :

· Business Source Premier
Business Source Premier is the industry’s most used business research database, providing full text for more than 2,300 journals, including full text for more than 1,100 peer-reviewed titles. Provides full-text coverage in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Updated daily.
· GreenFILE
GreenFILE offers well-researched information covering all aspects of human impact to the environment. Its collection of scholarly, government and general-interest titles includes content on global warming, green building, pollution, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, recycling, and more.
· Newspaper Source Plus
Newspaper Source Plus includes 1,520 full-text newspapers, providing more than 28 million full-text articles. In addition, the database features more than 601,300 television and radio news transcripts, videos & podcasts.
Regional Business News
Provides comprehensive full-text coverage for regional business publications. Regional Business News incorporates coverage of more than 80 regional business publications covering all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States.

Click on the links above to access, or follow the navigation below :
Affinity Intranet > Library > Find Articles in Databases > Databases by Subject > Ebsco Business Resources

Affinity Intranet > Library > Badgerlink > Service List > Business Resources

* Badgerlink is a project of the Department of Public Instruction’s Division for Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning for the citizens of Wisconsin. Funding is provided through the Public Service Commission Universal Service Fund. Try it : Full-text access from work, school, or home!