NLM’s Contributions to Healthy Communities

I’ve been on the job for eight months now, and I’m still learning more about the National Library of Medicine and its vast resources. These days, I’m broadening my understanding of how NLM  supports communities, population health, and public health.

The library has long had public health as an area of focus, both for its collection and its work. In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act formalized some of our efforts by creating at NLM the National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR).

Health services research (HSR) helps improve the quality and equity of health care for individuals and communities. NICHSR (pronounced “nik-H-S-R”) supports and promotes these efforts through its tools and by disseminating high-value information for the public health and health services workforce.

For example, in support of Healthy People 2020, a national program of specific objectives to improve the health of all Americans, NICHSR helps those in public health easily find the most up-to-date published evidence through a suite of preformulated PubMed search strategies. Their HSR and public health web portals deliver high-quality datasets, analyses, guidelines, and news, and the HSRProj database provides information about in-progress research before published results are available. And thanks to the newly-released NICHSR ONESearch, you can search across all NICHSR databases from a single point.

Committed to integrating resources for research and practice, NICHSR works closely with many of our sister federal agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Through the Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce (PHPartners), which is a consortium of US government agencies, public health organizations, and health sciences libraries, NICHSR also works with national organizations such as the American Public Health Association, the National Association of County and City Health Officials, and the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health. Together these collaborations deepen NLM’s work across the areas within public health while also promoting NLM’s public health resources to the communities who might benefit from them.

But NICHSR is not alone at NLM in working to ensure the health of communities and the people who live in them.

The NCBI Pathogen Detection System uses whole-genome sequencing to uncover potential sources of contamination during the outbreak of foodborne diseases. By comparing sequence data for bacterial pathogens obtained from food, the environment, and human patients to sequences in the NCBI database, we can determine if the bacteria are from the same outbreak, helping public health scientists trace the source of the contamination and target their response to the outbreak.

TOXNET, the flagship resource on toxicology and environmental health from the NLM Specialized Information Services (SIS) Division, delivers a collection of databases covering chemicals, drugs, occupational safety and health, poisoning, and toxicity risks, while SIS’s Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC) supports disaster preparedness, response, and recovery by connecting people to quality disaster health information and fostering a culture of community resiliency.

Our landmark exhibition, Native Voices, preserves the healing cultures of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and explores, among other things, how community lies at the center of Native conceptions of health. Through audio, video, photos, and stories, the exhibition—which is now traveling across the country—looks at how wellness of the individual is inseparable from harmony within the family and community and pride in one’s heritage.

This list, while far from comprehensive, gives a sense of the myriad ways this great library contributes to healthy communities. In fact, one could argue that everything we do ultimately has that impact.

And now we are looking for new and different ways to impact community health, this time through data and data-driven discovery. What ideas do you have about the types of data we should be collecting?