Duluth, Ga., June 10, 2019: Equinox is pleased to welcome Westchester Library System to Evergreen.

The adoption of Evergreen by the Westchester Library System will support their 399,438 patrons in addition to migrating 959,561 bibliographic records. Services provided by Equinox included Evergreen support, hosting, and auxiliary services in addition to project management and Evergreen software configuration. Data extraction and bibliographic deduplication were completed including authority, item, patron, transaction, acquisitions, and serials data. Authority Control services were provided during migration plus RDA and Lexile Enrichment. Staff of the Westchester Library System prepared for the migration with on site and remote training from Equinox.

“Our member libraries chose to adopt an open-source library management system because of the opportunities to affect meaningful change in the way the public accesses library services.” said Rob Caluori, director of information technology at Westchester Library System. “Equinox was a seasoned and thoughtful guide on our journey to have Evergreen serve the patrons of our member libraries. Patrons now have a modern online catalog offering more self-service options and extending more 24x7 library services and our member library staff have a more flexible and mobile-friendly environment with which to serve the public.”
Established in 1958 Westchester Library System collaborates with 38 libraries in Westchester County, New York to provide services, support and access to its 940,000 residents.

"Working with such a well organized central staff like Westchester was a real pleasure,” said Rogan Hamby, data and project analyst at Equinox. “There were a lot of moving parts to this migration, far beyond the usual data and setup. Everyone here came together and pitched in using their own strengths where needed to make sure nothing was left undone. It has been a delight to see this migration come together and to help the Westchester libraries get settled into their new ILS home."

About Equinox Open Library Initiative
Equinox Open Library Initiative Inc. is a 501(c)3 engaging in literary, charitable, and educational endeavors serving cultural and knowledge institutions. As the successor to Equinox Software, Inc., the Initiative carries forward a decade of service and experience with Evergreen and other open source library software. At Equinox OLI we help you empower your library with open source technologies. To learn more, please visit https://www.equinoxinitiative.org/.

About Evergreen
Evergreen is an award-winning ILS developed to provide an open source product able to meet the diverse needs of consortia and high transaction public libraries. However, it has proven to be equally successful in smaller installations including special and academic libraries. Today, over 1500 libraries around the world are using Evergreen including NC Cardinal, SC LENDS, and B.C. Sitka. For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

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DynaMed® Founder Leads Effort to Define Certainty of Net Benefit for Healthcare
~ An international working group publishes concepts to redefine the approach to clinical recommendations ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — June 10, 2019 — On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, BMJ Open published an open access paper which defines the “certainty of net benefit” as a proposed method to report the impact of clinical recommendations. The report follows two years of development and deliberation within the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) Working Group, an international collaborative that defines the most widely used method for expressing the certainty of evidence and strength of recommendations in clinical practice guidelines.

The paper’s lead author, Brian S. Alper, MD, MSPH, FAAFP, is the founder of DynaMed®, a point-of-care information resource for healthcare professionals that provides a synthesized and curated summary of the best current evidence and guidelines, and the Vice President of Innovations and Evidence-Based Medicine Development for EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), a company that is developing a prominent role in solving some of the greatest challenges in healthcare decision-making.

Defining Certainty of Net Benefit: A GRADE Concept Paper describes in detail how a guideline developer or other information provider reporting evidence and guidance for healthcare can explicitly determine and express the certainty that the benefits outweigh the harms for a specific decision. EBSCO also provides a free online calculator to allow developers to determine the certainty of net benefit without requiring advanced statistical software.

Peter Oettgen, MD, FACC, FAHA, FACP, Editor-in-Chief for DynaMed, Cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the paper’s eleven co-authors, states, “Our goal is to encourage transparent communication between clinicians and their patients. Over time, we hope to see an increasing impact of more quantitative approaches of determining the risks and benefits of treatments and tests for patients as they start to have a better understanding of their medical options and receive concrete recommendations from their physicians.”

Alfonso Iorio, MD, PhD, FRCPC, Professor in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact at McMaster University, a member of the DynaMed Executive Board, and another co-author of the paper, states, “This paper is a milestone in our journey toward a transparent and reproducible act of balancing benefits and harms across multiple patient important outcomes. This could transform the way we issue clinical recommendations. A more robust and reproducible link between evidence and action.”

The certainty of net benefit concept today is described from the perspective of a guideline developer speaking to a healthcare professional. The EBSCO Health Innovations team is actively evaluating systems to apply and introduce the concept for personal use to identify health improvement opportunities and support individualized shared decision-making tools.

To view the paper, visit BMJ Open at: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/6/e027445.full.

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

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For more information, please contact:
Jessica Holmes
Communications Director
978-356-6500 x3485
jmholmes@ebsco.com