The World Health Organization is updating its International Classification of Diseases using wiki-style techniques. Anyone can contribute as long as they can provide medical evidence and are willing to take part in online debate.

Blog article listing wikis dealing with a range of medical disciplines.

This paper explores factors that impinge on the “insider-researcher” (IR) when undertaking a work-based learning project. Themes of benefits and constraints identified the organisation, the clients and co-workers and the IR benefiting from work-based projects. The position and personal attributes of the IR may be a constraint. Of major consideration are ethical issues arising from the project process. Academics' concerns include student supervision, the impact on the IR, and factors affecting change and project processes.

From 11 May, a series of webcasts from practitioners who have implemented high impact changes will be available on the Improvement Foundation’s website.

The development of consumer health information applications such as health education websites has motivated the research on consumer health vocabulary (CHV). Term identification is a critical task in vocabulary development. Because of the heterogeneity and ambiguity of consumer expressions, term identification for CHV is more challenging than for professional health vocabularies. For the development of a CHV, the authors explored several term identification methods, including collaborative human review and automated term recognition methods.

The need for rapid access to information to support critical decisions in public health cannot be disputed; however, development of such systems requires an understanding of the actual information needs of public health professionals. This paper reports the results of a literature review focused on the information needs of public health professionals. The authors reviewed the public health literature to answer the following questions: (1) What are the information needs of public health professionals? (2) In what ways are those needs being met? (3) What are the barriers to meeting those needs? (4) What is the role of the Internet in meeting information needs?

This study was undertaken to provide evidence that library outreach projects in the NHS in the Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority area were effective and could justify continued funding. The major findings of this research are that training health-care personnel in the use of electronic resources impacts positively on their information literacy skills and confidence, and that the information available to them is considered to have potential value across health-care practice.

Healthcare informatics is an emerging profession in the UK, and both government and health-informatics practitioners recognise a need to advance its formalisation and development. The results of the study reported in this article identify a consensus on six actions that could be taken to progress those aims, from which four recommendations are derived.

Concerned about evidence-based health informatics, the authors conducted a limited pilot survey attempting to determine how many IT evaluation studies in health care are never published, and why. Reasons for not publishing (with multiple reasons per study possible) included: "results not of interest for others", "publication in preparation", "no time for publication", "limited scientific quality of study", "political or legal reasons", and "study only conducted for internal use".