Modern medicine is an information-driven discipline of prodigious size and complexity. In order to carry out useful research clinicians and biomedical scientists must spend large amounts of their time (and tax-payers money) searching for and reading information from a huge variety of sources.
Often they receive little formal guidance in how to use the growing number of information resources available to them, or even why it is important that they should know how to use them.
Furthermore, ease of access, integration and useability are often not the priorities of product developers such as commercial publishers or informatics labs.
So the problem has two sides: the design of the services and the education of the end users to use them effectively. Ultimately, the goal is to get work published in a journal of the highest quality. Often this process ends in at best frustration, at worst rejection.
How we can help
Ganesha Associates supports biomedical innovation by helping publishers, educators, governments, and research organizations understand how information and technology can be used together more effectively to drive efficiency and creativity throughout the biomedical and healthcare workflows – from the virtual library, to the bench, and so to the bedside.
We also run courses designed to teach students and researchers how to perform more effective research and to improve the quality of their publication output. Currently our focus is on the development of courses which are fully Web-based, taking advantage of open software such as Moodle.
What’s cookin’?
I’ve just finished (Jan 2017) working as part of a project team assessing ways to value the impact of the European Bioinformatics Institute’s Elixir database framework based here in Cambridge, UK.
You can find out more up-to-date information about my past activities at LinkedIn.
Current on-going services
These include: