Re-imagining the Role of the Health Sciences Librarian in the New Information Economy: an Informaticist’s Perspective

Abstract

The future of medicine and medical librarianship is going to be significantly information and knowledge driven. How we defined physicians, patients, and librarians is going to be critical to the future success in these rapidly evolving fields.

Philip J. Kroth, MD, MS, joined HSLIC in 2004 as the Assistant Director of Health Sciences Informatics Program Development and as an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine. He holds a joint appointment in the Division of General Internal Medicine and is a practicing, board certified Internist. He is also the Biomedical Informatics Director for UNM’s new Clinical and Translational Sciences Center.

Dr. Kroth earned a Masters in clinical research and completed a 3-year, National Library of Medicine sponsored research fellowship in biomedical informatics, both at the Regenstrief Institute at Indiana University. He earned his BS is in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and worked for 4 years in that capacity for Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY before attending medical school at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo.

Dr. Kroth has performed research on the effectiveness of computerized decision support and his current interest is in quantifying the actual cost savings and quality improvements made possible in clinical care venues that have access to inter-institutional clinical data. Recent research also has focused on issues related to open access publishing: “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on enhancing public access: tracking institutional contribution rates.” JMLA, 94(3): 279 – 283, July 2006.

At HSLIC, Dr. Kroth is responsible for the development of the UNM Biomedical Informatics Training Program which is one of only a few in the country that are organizationally housed inside a health sciences library. This has provided Dr. Kroth with a very unique perspective on medicine and research from inside the “librarians’ world” as well as a view of the state of the health sciences librarian profession from the “outside” perspective of physician and biomedical informatician.