Enhancing Public Health Law Communication Linkages

It has been pointed out during discussions of earlier versions of this draft that not all public health practitioners lack access; some, in fact, may have access to a surfeit of information which complicates the process of quickly and easily identifying quality, timely materials.

It is assumed by the author that it is not the goal of the Public Health Law Association (or any other public health law initiative) to attempt to compete as a content provider with such commercial legal research services as Lexis, Westlaw, and free legal compendia such as Law.com, AtLaw.org, or the Cornell University Legal Information Institute (http://www.law.cornell.edu/). Furthermore, this report will not discuss which content areas of public health law PHLA might or should cover through its own educational or research endeavors, nor will it recommend how the Public Health Law Association can generate comprehensive new knowledge bases (such as jurisdiction-specific public health law bench books), or become the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes public health law.

The term “public health practitioner” generally refers to those utilizing public health law materials in efforts to improve the public's health, and is not limited to those working directly for federal, state or local public health government agencies.

As the Public Health Law Association is the primary professional organization engaged in the study of this question, this report may, at times, specifically consider the capacity of PHLA to undertake such professional educational efforts. Most of this report's findings, however, could be applied by any professional organization. Therefore, any specific reference to PHLA should also be understood to mean “organizations interested in expanding access to public health law knowledge.”

Special thanks to Benken Donald Burbach Cindy Iton Anthony Lopez Wilfredo Lynk Myles Simon Michele , and Amy Winterfeld for their guidance during a work group session convened by the Public Health Law Association; also to Marilyn Thomas, Lee Lane, and Heather McCabe for their input concerning the paper during an October 2007 conference call; and especially to Patricia Davidson, Dianne Hoffman, Daniel O'Brien, Clifford Rees, Virginia Rowthorn, Jason Smith, and Marty Wasserman for sharing their suggestions and enthusiasm throughout the project.

See, e.g., the CDC's Web site for its 2006 conference on The Public's Health and the Law in the 21st Century, available at <http://www2.cdc.gov/phlp/conferencecd2006/session.htm> (last visited June 26, 2008), or the Texas Association of Local Health Officials' intranet system and publication of its virtual conference proceedings, available at <www.talho.org/php-summit2007.asp> (last visited July 16, 2008).

In fact, it is often recommended that presenters wishing to make an effective PowerPoint presentation minimize the amount of information appearing on their slides, creating a paradoxical situation so that the worst live presentations — those bogged down in slides filled with data tables and bullet points that essentially are read aloud by the presenter — become the most valuable for uploading online without also uploading audio or video of the presenter's remarks.

See Supercourse , available at <http://www.pitt.edu/∼superl/> (last visited June 26, 2008).

The following section is based upon e-mail communications between the author and Dr. LaPorte in July 2007.

The source of the $5,000 in annual funding appears to be personal donations by the Web site creators. Even this funding, however, appears to have dried up: on September 27, 2007, the founder of the Supercourse announced that, absent identification of new funding streams or development of a new business plan, the Supercourse would cease collecting new lectures and offering additional educational activities on January 1, 2008. E-mail correspondence from Ronald E. LaPorte, September 27, 2007 (on file with author).

There are a number of different ways that content experts may make their materials freely available to be shared for educational or entertainment purposes without having to get bogged down in the significant legal and procedural roadblocks created by the U.S. Copyright system, including the use of Creative Commons agreements, which allows for more open use of materials by the public while protecting the ownership rights of the content creators.

Google recently announced the development of a Web-based presentation feature in its Google Docs software suite (http://docs.google.com). Other online presentation software options include Zoho Show (http://show.zoho.com), Preezo (http://www.preezo.com), and SlideShare (http://slideshare.net) (all last visited June 26, 2008).

However, the amount of public health law and ethics content is minimal. A review of the titles of the available lectures on the Supercourse site indicated that less than 10 of the lectures highlighted legal, political, or ethics-related issues in public health law.

According to the American Bar Association, 38 states approve at least some form of teleconferences and live audio broadcasts for MCLE: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. See American Bar Association, Center for Continuing Legal Education, available at <http://www.abanet.org/cle/cle_faq.html#mcle_tele> (last visited June 26, 2008).

See American Bar Association, Center for Continuing Legal Education, available at <http://www.abanet.org/cle/ecle/home.html> (last visited June 26, 2008).

The Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum offers a public health and the law online seminar that can be used to acquire six hours of MCLE. See Indiana Continuing Legal Education Forum, available at <http://www.iclef.org/> (last visited June 26, 2008).

On the issue of what constitutes “proper” results: it should be noted that patient safety experts like to say that the health care system delivers exactly the type of results they were built to deliver; however, in this case, “proper” means the results the health care providers ideally would have like to have seen delivered to the patient, given the patient's care needs.

Chassin M. R. Becher E. C. , “The Wrong Patient,” Annals of Internal Medicine 136, no. 11 (2002): 826–833.

See, e.g., Brennan T. A. Mello M. M. , “Patient Safety and Medical Malpractice: A Case Study,” Annals of Internal Medicine 139, no. 4 (2003): 267–273.

Web M&M, available at <http://webmm.ahrq.gov> (last visited June 26, 2008).

Wachter R. M. Shojania K. G. , “The Faces of Errors: A Case-Based Approach to Educating Providers, Policymakers, and the Public about Patient Safety,” Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety 30, no. 12 (2004): 665–671, at 666.

What follows are insights gained by the author through conversation with Dr. Wachter and Erin Hartman, Web M&M and PSNet Project Manager.

“PayPal” is a Web site which coordinates the payment of funds online without allowing for the sharing of personally identifiable information between the two contracting parties. It is available at <http://www.paypal.com> (last visited July 17, 2008). This is one of the most popular ways for transactions to be conducted between bidders and item sellers on eBay, for example.

Dr. Wachter estimated that it would cost “between $100,000 and $200,000” to develop a high quality Web presence. Dr. Wachter stated he believed the “feel” of the Web site was almost as important for buy-in by readers and contributors as the content the site itself provided. However, it is the opinion of this report writer that such services may be desirable, but should not be seen as a barrier to the development of similar efforts for the public health law field.

Wachter credits the short turn-around time and short length of requested submissions as key to their successful solicitation and receipt of expert commentaries, although the availability of an honorarium for such a brief contribution also must be considered as a useful recruitment tool.

It is the opinion of the author that the opportunity for an author to work with a professional editorial team as part of the publication process is both a dying art in the field of law publication, and a strong selling point for establishing credibility and enthusiasm in the market.

Access to cases published at earlier dates is still open; however, CME credit cannot be received for their review.

See Wachter Shojania , supra note 21, at 668.

Public Health Law Association conference call, September 17, 2007.

Id.

Even if such a conference or presentation were invitation-only or jurisdiction-specific, alerting the public health law community that such an event were taking place, and who might be reached to gain further information about the event, would be valuable to improving connections between public health law professionals. Id.

See Steinert Y. McLeod P. J. Conochie L. , and Nasmith L. , “An Online Discussion for Medical Faculty: An Experiment that Failed,” Academic Medicine 77, no. 9 (2002): 939–940 (citing concerns about confidentiality, time, competing demands, a lack of perceived needs by the potential users, and comfort with the technology as obstacles to implementation of an online discussion board).

See Pinch Ellenchild W. J. Graves J. K. , “Using Web-Based Discussion as a Teaching Strategy: Bioethics as an Exemplar,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 32, no. 3 (2000): 704712; Derse A. R. Krogull S. R. , “The Bioethics Online Service — An Implementation of a Bioethics Database and Information Resource,” Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (1994): 354–357.

O'Reilly T. , “What Is Web 2.0,” available at <http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html> (last visited June 26, 2008). An excellent five-minute video describing the benefits of “Web 2.0” has been created by digital ethnographer Michael Wesh. See Wesch M. , “The Machine Is Us/ing Us (Final Version),” available at <http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g> (last visited July 17, 2008).

Id. See also Gerstein J. , “New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps,” The Sun (New York), March 21, 2007, available at <http://www.nysun.com/article/50895> (last visited June 25, 2008); Nakata N. Fukuda Y. Fukuda K. , and Suzuki N. , “DICOM Wiki: Web-Based Collaboration and Knowledge Database System for Radiologists,” International Congress Series 1281 (2005): 980–985; TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), “Theme: The Rise of Collaboration,” available at <http://www.ted.com/themes/view/id/19> (last visited June 25, 2008). Web 2.0-driven technologies also are finding their way into health care and health education settings. M. N. Kamel Boulos and Wheeler S. , “The Emerging Web 2.0 Social Software: An Enabling Suite of Sociable Technologies in Health and Health Care Education,” Health Information and Libraries Journal 24, no. 1 (2007): 2–23. Supporters of the benefits of such technologies in the scientific community also frequently champion the cause of Open Access to research data and publications. Open Access is defined by Wikipedia as “free, immediate, permanent, full-text, online access, for any user, web-wide, to digital scientific and scholarly material, primarily research articles published in peer-reviewed journals. OA means that any individual user, anywhere, who has access to the Internet, may link, read, download, store, print-off, use, and datamine the digital content of that article. An OA article usually has limited copyright and licensing restrictions.” Wikipedia entry on Open Access, available at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access> (citations omitted) (last visited July 17, 2008). See also Walport M. Kiley R. , “Open Access, U.K. PubMed Central and the Wellcome Trust,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 9 (2006): 438–439; Doyle H. Gass A. , and Kennison R. , “Open Access and Scientific Societies,” Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology 2, no. 5 (2004): E156; Yuille M. Korn B. Moore T. Farmer A. A. Carrino J. Prange C. , and Hayashizaki Y. , “The Responsibility to Share: Sharing the Responsibility,” Genome Research 14, no. 10B (2004): 2015–2019.

See O'Reilly , supra note 34.

Encyclopedia of Life, available at <http://www.eol.org/home.html> (last visited June 26, 2008).

Flu Wiki, available at <http://www.fluwikie.com/> (last visited June 26, 2008). Social networking technology has been used to develop online patient-driven (rather than provider driven) epidemiological maps of illness outbreaks. See <http://whoissick.org/sickness/> (last viewed July 17, 2008); Pescovitz D. , “Who Is Sick? User-Generated Epidemiology Map,” April 19, 2007, available at <http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/19/who-is-sick-usergene.html> (last visited June 25, 2008). Government agencies also have used blogging technology to increase information sharing concerning pandemic preparedness. Revere, “A Not So New but Good Internet Idea for Pandemic Response,” available at <http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/02/a_not_so_new_but_good_internet.php> (last visited July 16, 2008). “Revere” is a pseudonym for the author(s) of the Effect Measure public health weblog (blog). The name Revere was adopted by the Web site author(s) as an homage to Paul Revere, who served as a member of the nation's first local Board of Health. Also see S. Elizabeth Malloy, “Flu Stories,” HealthLawProf Blog, May 22, 2007, available at <http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/healthlawprof_blog/2007/05/flu_stories.html> (last visited June 25, 2008).

Andrus Calvin D. , “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” available at <https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no3/html_files/Wik_and_%20Blog_7.htm> (last visited June 26, 2008); Thompson C. , “Open Source Spying,” New York Times Magazine, December 6, 2006, at 54.

Kennedy D. Mighell T. , “Wikis for the Legal Profession,” Law Practice Today, February 2007, available at <http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/slc02071.shtml> (last visited June 26, 2008); Legal Talk Network, “Legal Wikis,” available at <http://www.legaltalknetwork.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=175> (last visited June 25, 2008); Ambrogi R. , “Legal Professionals Are Using Wikis — Widely and Wisely,” Social Computing Magazine Web site, available at <http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=253> (last visited July 16, 2008).

OpenCongress, available at <http://www.opencongress.org/> (last visited July 16, 2008). See also Doctorow C. , “Open-Congress — Ripping Open the Doors to Congress with Web 2.0,” available at <http://feeds.http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/26/opencongress-ripping.html> (last visited July 17, 2008).

Varchaver N. , “Patent Review Goes Wiki,” Fortune 154, no. 4, August 21, 2006.

Ramachandran A. , “Police Wiki Lets You Write the Law,” available at <http://www.stuff.co.nz/4215797a10.html> (last visited June 26, 2008).

Lessig L. , Code: Version 2.0 (New York: Basic Books/Perseus, 2006).

7th Circuit Court of Appeals Wiki, “Main Page,” available at <http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page> (last visited June 25, 2008).

Ho M. , “Assignment Zero First Take: Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness,” Wired, available at <http://www.wired.com/tech-biz/media/news/2007/05/assignment_zero_citizendium> (last visited June 25, 2008); Sanger L. , “Who Says We Know: On the New Politics of Knowledge,” available at <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html> (last visited June 25, 2008); Shirky C. , “Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise,” September 18, 2006, available at <http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/09/18/larry_sanger_citizendium_and_the_problem_of_expertise.php> (last visited June 25, 2008).

See, e.g., Tapscott D. Williams A. D. , Wikinomics (New York: Portfolio, 2006); Benkler Y. , The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). However, even within such successful wiki-based endeavors such as Wikipedia, there is interest in gaining the insights of content experts on subject matter. See, e.g., the Wikipedia entry for Ear Candling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ear_candling [last visited June 26, 2008]), which includes the following disclaimer on its content: “This article requires authentication or verification by an expert. Please assist in recruiting an expert or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details. This article has been tagged since March 2007.”

Giles J. , “Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head To Head,” Nature, 438 (2005): 900–901 (examining the accuracy of science entries in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica). In fact, the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica recently announced that the redesign of their Web site will include additional collaborative opportunities. However, they also distinguish between their expert-driven collaborative process and the more freely manipulated Wikipedia approach, stating their position that “the creation and documentation of knowledge is a collaborative process but not a democratic one.” “Collaboration and the Voices of Experts,” available at <http://britannicanet.com/?p=88> (last viewed July 16, 2008).

Singel R. , “Veni, Vidi, Wiki,” Wired, available at <http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/09/71733?currentPage=all> (last visited June 25, 2008); See Gerstein , supra note 35.

For a general discussion of various theories on law education, see Schwartz M. H. , “Teaching Law by Design: How Learning Theory and Instructional Design Can Inform and Reform Law Teaching,” San Diego Law Review 38, no. 2 (2001): 347–462. For a discussion of the use of technology in legal education, see Caron P. L. Gely R. , “Taking Back the Law School Classroom: Using Technology to Foster Active Student Learning,” Journal of Legal Education 54, no. 4 (2004): 551–569.

Fox J. , “Getting Rich Off Those Who Work for Free,” Time, February 15, 2007, available at <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1590440,00.html> (last visited June 25, 2008).

See Lessig , supra note 44.

Results received concerning contribution to online message board discussions or webinars did show a slightly higher interest than any activities associated with an online database.

Carlson S. , “The Net Generation Goes to College, Chronicle of Higher Education,” October 7, 2005, available at <http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07a03401.htm> (last visited June 26, 2008).

CDC, Public Health Law Program, available at <http://www2a.cdc.gov/phlp/> (last visited June 26, 2008).

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, available at <http://www.rwjf.org/programareas/features/digestlist.jsp?pid=1141> (last visited June 26, 2008).

Social Science Research Network, Legal Scholarship Network, Public Health Law & Policy Abstract Database, available at <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalBrowse&journal_id=786246> (last visited June 26, 2008). The coordinator of the Public Health Law & Policy Abstract Database is Scott Burris of the Temple University — James E. Beasley School of Law. As of August 20, 2007, there were 1,006 articles listed in this topic area on the web site.

Richards E. P. , Web site for the Louisiana State University Law Center's Program in Law, Science, and Public Health, available at <http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/> (last visited July 17, 2008). See also the Web site for The Centers for Law & The Public's Health: A Collaborative at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities, available at <http://www.publichealthlaw.net/> (last visited July 17, 2008).

See, e.g., Trapani G. , “Geek to Live: Create Your Master Feed with Yahoo! Pipes,” available at <http://www.lifehacker.com/software/feeds/geek-to-live—create-your-master-feed-with-yahoo-pipes-235726.php> (last visited June 26, 2008); Broida R. , “Cool Ways to Use Yahoo! Pipes,” available at <http://www.lifehacker.com/software/pipes/cool-ways-to-use-yahoo-pipes-236417.php> (last viewed June 26, 2008); Boswell W. , “Customized Google News for Your Web Page,” available at <http://www.lifehacker.com/software/google-news/customized-google-news-for-your-web-page-235622.php> (last viewed June 26, 2008).

See the blog created by the American Journal of Bioethics available at <http://bioethics.net> (last visited June 26, 2008) for an example of how this might be approached.