Health IT

New NLM chief wants to focus on data, consumer friendliness

Patricia Flatley Brennan officially took the reins of the National Library of Medicine just two months ago, and already the veteran nursing informatics specialist is putting her stamp on the federal agency.

National Library of Medicine Director Patricia Flatley Brennan speaks at AMIA 2016 in Chicago.

Print media may be withering on the vine, but don’t write off libraries just yet. In fact, the director of the National Library of Medicine sees a bright future for medical libraries — as long as they evolve.

“What the library was, which was a stable repository of knowledge, is no longer possible,” NLM Director Patricia Flatley Brennan said Tuesday in a keynote address to the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium in Chicago. “Now the big action is moving upstream to the data.”

Brennan officially took the reins of the National Institutes of Health-affiliated NLM just two months ago, and already the veteran nursing informatics specialist is putting her stamp on the federal agency. “The Brennan era will be one of data,” she said.

“The dynamic interplay of knowledge and medicine is where we’re going and where we want to be,” Brennan added.

She elaborated by showing this slide:

Speaking of slides, Brennan opened her talk by noting that she has consistently been asked one question since last week’s election of Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States: “How do I think NLM will fare under the new administration?”

Brennan answered with a slide containing a statement from NIH: “NIH has a long history of bipartisan support and stands ready to work with the new administration to improve people’s health and reduce the burden of disease for biomedical research.”

So NLM is not likely to go anywhere, despite the specter of budget cuts. The Trump transition team did say last week that the president-elect intends to “advance research and development in healthcare.”

Brennan is considered a career employee rather than a political appointee. Her predecessor, Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, retired in March after 31 years in charge. Lindberg ran NLM under five U.S. presidents.

So Brennan was not afraid to go a step farther than Trump’s generic statement. “I pledge to grow our research program,” she said. Brennan indicated that she wants to grow extramural research by 10 percent in the next year, regardless of what Congress does with the overall NLM budget.

Even on the subject of the budget, Brennan sounded an optimistic tone. “I am not at all concerned with our budget being reduced,” she said. In fact, NLM is likely to get more funding in 2017 than it did this year.

With NLM now pivoting to data, Brennan promised Tuesday to enable direct deposit of data in support of PubMed Central articles by October 2017. “This is part of the open data movement,” she said.

Brennan also wants NLM to become more consumer-friendly. “I will be expanding our outreach to our citizens,” she promised.

Brennan noted that the new head of the Library of Congress, Carla Hayden, said in interview with PBS in September that a major reason people use public libraries these days is to look for health information.

“Our partners are both professional and lay,” Brennan said. “We must bring both of them together and use our communication channels to reach them.”

Photos: Neil Versel/MedCity News

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