Coming Soon: Online Journal
By Morgan Fincham, AASLD Staff
A team of staff members, publishers, and Editor Michael R. Lucey, MD, of the University of Wisconsin, met at our publisher's, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, headquarters last month to solidify plans for AASLD’s exciting new electronic, educational, and interactive publication: Clinical Liver Disease.
This new, bi-monthly, open access journal’s goal is to educate and inform through a variety of electronic media. AASLD is excited to be the first in the field to embrace the opportunities of modern technology by launching this project. Each issue will cover one single topic from a variety of angles that clinicians and midlevel providers experience in their day-to-day practice. The inaugural edition will cover hepatitis C. Because the format is electronic, it is possible to roll out breaking new information as it occurs, making this publication the most up to date anywhere.
“Contributions will have mixed forms,” Dr. Lucey explains. “We anticipate individual items may have a typed, audio, and even a video portion.” The variety of ways information is disseminated is vital to getting that information to members. “If you have 15 minutes, you may read it online,” Dr. Lucey illustrates, “but you may only have ten minutes, so you listen to the audio portion in your car on the way in and read more about it later.” Dr Lucey says that he believes that Clinical Liver Disease would be of interest to a wide spectrum of professionals with an interest in hepatology, including gastroenterologists, hepatologists, hepatobiliary surgeons, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and many doctors in training.
Clinical Liver Disease will synergize closely with the endeavors of AASLD. Lectures and syllabi from The Liver Meeting® courses will be deconstructed into podcasts and slide presentations. “This publication will provide AASLD’s Special Interest Groups a venue to present interesting and new material,” Dr. Lucey enthuses, “and integrates one presentation with another.” Single Topic Conferences also have a great opportunity. “The number of people who attend Single Topic Conferences is very small. So this is an opportunity for speakers to find a wider audience and for membership to gain access to information that was presented at a STC,” Dr. Lucey continues. “The person who is interested but can’t attend now will have another way to participate in and benefit from the STCs.”
AASLD Practice Guidelines codify best practices in clinical hepatology. "When we produce new guidelines," Dr. Lucey announces, "we recalibrate standards of practice." Indeed AASLD Practice Guideline recommendations become the definitive source for answers for Board exams. “Our guidelines are highly utilized on AASLD’s website,” Dr. Lucey remarks. “but there are additional ways the essential elements of each guideline could be presented to our membership, and the broader medical community. In Clinical Liver Disease, members of the Practice Guideline writing committee will have the opportunity to expand a little on why a guideline recommendation is important and how it was formulated." Dr. Lucey continues, "We plan to use case-based scenarios and ‘Board’ style questions in each edition of Clinical Liver Disease to illustrate the current knowledge and best practices. We believe that these features will be interesting and informative to all readers, and particularly helpful to professionals preparing for certification and re-certification exams.” Since this is an interactive journal, readers will also be able to leave comments online.
We look forward to providing this exciting new form of interactive, multi-media research and education in the first quarter of 2012.
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