KidsCareEverywhere Brings the Latest
Medical Information to Developing Countries
~ Nonprofit Offers Clinical Resource PEMSoft to Resource-Poor Hospitals ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — November 7, 2013 — Health professionals in multiple impoverished countries in Asia and Africa have access to the latest evidence-based, pediatric clinical information because of innovative work being done by KidsCareEverywhere. According to a recent study in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, access to that information helps healthcare professionals manage care in low-income countries.

EBSCO Health donates the clinical point-of-care resource PEMSoft, the definitive resource for evidence-based, pediatric clinical information at the point-of-care, to KidsCareEverywhere. The California nonprofit then trains the doctors and nurses on how to use the software to provide better health care to children in public hospitals and clinics.

Currently, KidsCareEverywhere supports doctors and hospitals in 15 different countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo, Yemen, South Africa, Morocco, Namibia, Senegal, and Vanuatu. Doctors learn English as part of medical training worldwide, and are able to use PEMSoft because almost every doctor, even in the most impoverished countries, has a smart phone to download the PEMSoft mobile app so access to the internet or electricity is not necessary.

PEMSoft has been shown to be a key practice resource, even for those who only receive a 45 minute training session and are non-primary English speakers. In a study published in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine (14(5) 471-476), September 2013, the use of the desktop version of PEMSoft was associated with a dramatic 81 percent increase in the ability of Vietnamese physicians to correctly manage common clinical pediatric emergency medicine cases.

KidsCareEverywhere Founder and Executive Director, Ronald Dieckmann MD, MPH believes that access to PEMSoft is vitally important for the hospitals that KidsCareEverywhere is helping. “We help doctors help kids everywhere. Very few of our site health professionals have any medical textbooks or medical references at all to help make critical medical decisions at the bedside. Ironically, almost all of them have access to computers and smart phones, but they have no medical software.”

During a recent trip to Ethiopia and Tanzania, KidsCareEverywhere trained nearly 200 physicians, residents and medical students at national facilities on the benefits of using PEMSoft in their daily practice. At the Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where half of the country’s pediatricians and all of its emergency physicians are trained, PEMSoft quickly became the most frequently used reference tool by pediatric residents, and is now used routinely to guide treatment of the most severe and complex cases.

KidsCareEverywhere is looking to expand its sustainable medicine outreach program at the National Hospital for Pediatrics in Hanoi, Vietnam in early 2014. The outreach will include donation of the new mobile PEMSoft application called "PEMSoft Mobile" for smart phones and tablet PCs and on-site instruction by the KidsCareEverywhere team. This project will test the feasibility of the mobile app in a large, controlled clinical trial.

In June, 2013, KidsCareEverywhere will be partnering with the Timmy Foundation from Indianapolis to train health professionals in software utilization in the Amazon basin in Ecuador—where there is no internet access or reliable electricity. Because the PEMSoft Portable mobile app resides on the native memory of the smart phone or tablet PC, the lack of internet access at the point of care will not limit utilization, even in this remote location.

Dr. Dieckmann, who is also EBSCO’s managing Editor-in-Chief of PEMSoft, is encouraged by the many successes he has seen so far. “I am inspired by the transformations we have witnessed already after the work that we do to bring remote colleagues into 21st century medicine.”

PEMSoft is licensed commercially to hundreds of American, Canadian, Australian and other Western hospitals by EBSCO Information Services, who owns the software. To learn more about the work KidsCareEverywhere is doing, visit www.kidscareeverywhere.org. For more information on PEMSoft, visit www.pemsoft.com.

About EBSCO Health
EBSCO Health, part of EBSCO Information Services, is a leading provider of clinical decision support solutions, healthcare business intelligence, and medical research information for the healthcare industry. EBSCO Health users include professionals in medicine, nursing, and allied health. Flagship products include CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Nursing Reference Center™, clinical e-books and e-journals, EBSCO Discovery Service™, licensed databases (such as MEDLINE®), plus EBSCONET®. EBSCO databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the electronic resource favored by libraries around the world.
About EBSCO Information Services

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 375 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical librarians, social workers, hospital administrators, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Nursing Reference Center™, Patient Education Reference Center™, Rehabilitation Reference Center™, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source™ and SocINDEX™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE®, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO website at: www.ebsco.com.

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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Vice President of Communications
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebsco.com

11/7/2013
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Roseman University Library Chooses ByWater Solutions’ Koha Support

ByWater Solutions, an open source community contributor and America’s forefront provider of Koha support, announced today that the library at Roseman University of Health Sciences is now live on their installation of the Koha integrated library system.

ByWater Solutions completed the migration for the Roseman University Library this summer and will be providing ongoing Koha support and hosting services to them. Their custom OPAC can be viewed at http://libcatalog.roseman.edu

Suzanne Fayle, Electronic Resources/Systems Librarian at Roseman University of Health Sciences talked about their choice to switch to Koha:

“We needed a system that was going to be flexible & intuitive for all of our users. Koha is both & more. The ByWater staff welcomed us & the migration process could not have been easier. Continued support from ByWater has been a positive experience. They are personable & take time to answer any questions we may have as well as help us make decisions on how the system can work better for us. As system administrator I no longer dread simple tasks like importing new patron records or importing bib records. I’m thrilled to be working with ByWater & look forward to Koha’s future growth!”

Nicole Engard, VP of Education welcomes ByWater’s newest partners:

“I had the pleasure of training the team at the Roseman University libraries and it was a pleasure. I loved their enthusiasm during training and their desire to learn all about what Koha could do for their library. I look forward to working with them for many years to come.”

About Roseman University of Health Sciences:

Founded in 1999, Roseman University of Health Sciences is a private, non-profit institution of higher learning with campuses in Henderson, Nev. and South Jordan, Utah. The university is comprised of the College of Dental Medicine, offering an Advanced Education in Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics/MBA residency and Doctor of Dental Medicine program; College of Pharmacy, offering a Doctor of Pharmacy and Professional Continuing Education; College of Nursing, offering a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing; and an MBA program. The university is regionally accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities and is an equal opportunity institution. For more information about Roseman University, please visit http://www.roseman.edu.

About Koha:

Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha’s impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies–XHTML, CSS and Javascript–making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: http://koha-community.org/

About ByWater Solutions:

ByWater Solutions is a full service, high quality support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their ILS than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in first rate Koha implementation and support with library systems of all sizes. Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions to support Koha not only lowers the cost of implementing and maintaining an ILS, but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit: http://bywatersolutions.com/