researching medical literature for attorneys: new …126...find articles that support their...

Copyright 2017 The Pat Iyer Group www.legalnursebusiness.com 1

LNP 126 Researching Medical Literature for Attorneys: New Tools

Darrell Gunter

Pat: Welcome to Legal Nurse Podcasts. This is Pat Iyer and today I have with me Darrell Gunter who is a graduate of Seton Hall University's Stillman School of Business. Seton Hall is located in beautiful New Jersey. He obtained his Bachelor's of Science in Business Administration with a concentration in marketing from Seton Hall and earned his MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.

Darrell is an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University where he teaches consultative sales on the graduate and undergraduate level, and lectures to the Rutgers Entrepreneurial Pioneers Initiative Program.

Darrell is a digital publishing executive and we'll talk some more in our program about what that means. He's also one of the leading advocates of consultative sales, search platforms, semantic technology, mobile applications and social networking in the digital information age.

He's a frequent speaker and moderator at many industry events, advocating the benefits of semantic search technology, mobile applications and social network. Darrell has worked for the leaders of the electronic intellectual property industry such as Xerox, Dow Jones Financial News Services, Elsevier, Collexis, The American Institute of Physics and Allerton Press. He heads up his own consulting firm called the "Gunter Media Group", which is at www.GunterMediaGroup.com.

Darrell, welcome to the show and I'm so pleased that you can be with us today.

Darrell: Pat, thank you. I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to you and your audience.


Pat: I thought we would start with having you give a little bit more of your background and experience, particularly as it relates to understanding the world of finding medical literature and authoritative references.

Darrell: Interesting enough I started off my career in the information space with Xerox and Dow Jones then coming over to Collexis. It helped me to understand the challenge of the sea of data that the general population and the nursing population have in trying to find the most germane and relevant article to a search query that they have.

Oftentimes when folks are doing scholarly research they're trying to find articles that support their hypothesis, but also, they need to find articles that are the adverse effect as well. They want to make sure that they're giving their readers a 360-degree view on the topic that they're researching. Oftentimes when people are doing a search, which Google's the most common, they will do a search and get a result of 90 plus pages. Typically, most people will only look at the first one, two or three pages.

Now there are more specialty databases out there that the professionals use, but even then, the results are delivered in what I call a "Vertical Fashion". This means that there are pages of articles that they have to go through. Sometimes what I found is that with semantic technology you're able to really zero in and find the needle in the haystack.

This is currently a huge issue for not only the professional market place. Oftentimes when someone, or let's say a researcher is applying for a NIH grant sometimes, their grant application is rejected because of a paper that they might have missed. That's why I feel that semantic search is so important in today's time.

I did a demonstration of our interface, Pubs21, to Seton Hall's medical school library. One of the benefits she said to me was that, "You mean if people don't have to learn the MESH terms and they could just cut and paste an article?" I said, "Yes. Now that doesn't mean that people should not learn the MESH terms. They really should because that's very important. It's helping them to find the most relevant article pertaining to their particular search."


Pat: You mentioned a couple of terms that I thought would be helpful for our listeners to know a little bit more about. One of them was "Semantic Technology or Semantic Search" and the other was "MESH Terms". Could you give us a little bit more of a background on how we can understand the use of those terms?

Darrell: "MESH Terms" refers to medical subject headers. It's an ontology that is used within the life science research community as to how to classify various and different terms like heart attack is myocardial infarction. It allows you to have multiple terms with the same meaning. That's very important.

Now let's talk about the "Semantic Technology, the Semantic Web". Tim Berners-Lee, a gentleman from CERN who actually wrote the code to create the Internet, had an article back in the late 1980's talking about the semantic web.

Imagine if you will that you have all of these communities and you're able to connect these communities based upon their relevant and their concurrent needs that they might have. For example, when you think about researches in the life sciences PubMed is a database that your audience uses quite a bit. PubMed is a database of scholarly articles that were generated by NIH funded research.

NIH currently gives out about $30 billion in grants every year. The research from those grants by law the content has to be up on the web 12 months after publication. What we did was to create a semantic view of the NIH's PubMed, which we created a product back in 2008 called "BuyMedExperts.com." It showed a profile of a researcher and their co-authors, but also you could find other researchers who probably have not co-authored a paper with co-author A, but because they both had done research on diabetes you can connect them.

You want to connect content and context to each other. What the semantic algorithms allow folks to do is to be able to make these connections across the web. If you had a researcher who was doing research on diabetes complications in the southwest section of the United States and you had another researcher in Australia who was doing similar research, by using semantic technology we can connect


them by subject area. If they were connected, they can see that Professor Stanley in Australia is doing the same type of research as Professor Williams who's at Los Alamos National Labs. You're able to connect them.

It's almost like looking at your garage and knowing that you purchased some items from Home Depot and you need to fix something, but you need three or four of these items. You know they're somewhere in the garage, so you got to clean the garage out. Well if you had a semantic web for your garage you will know exactly where those items were so that when you need to do a very specific task you can find them.

Pat: It makes me think of a woman that I met when I was teaching at a hospital who said she knew where every item in her house was located. I came home and told my husband who can lose a piece of paper while it's in his hand. He said, "How could she function that way?" She said, "How could he function with his level of chaos?"

It sounds like semantic technology eliminates the chaos and connects people in ways that they could never be connected before to be able to precisely find each other.

Darrell: That's correct, and you've heard of Just in Time Manufacturing.

Pat: I know Just in Time Printing is something that CreateSpace does for their books for Amazon where they literally print a book when they get an order.

Darrell: Right and that's what semantic technology enables you to do. When you have a need for a particular type of information, it can find it for you very efficiently and effectively.

Pat: You mentioned PubMed in terms of a service that is free for users to be able to locate medical information. Are there for-a-fee services that you're familiar with?

Darrell: There are several of them. All of your top publishers Elsevier, Wiley, Walter Floyd is very popular in the nursing community. All of them have subscription services that they can access. They can access it via


their institution if their institution has a subscription or they can access it on a per diem basis, which is very expensive, and I'll give you an example. If you wanted to buy a scholarly article off of Elsevier Science Direct, you would pay about $30 which is pretty expensive.

There are some other options out there where you can rent an article for a day. There's an organization called DeepDive and then there are other platforms like EBSCOhost that might be very familiar to your audience, as well as ProQuest and Cengage Gale.

There are a number of different specialty databases out there that people will use to find information. You can walk into any of your land-grant institutions as a citizen and use these services for free of course on-site at the university or within the library.

Pat: You said, "Land-grant" are you talking about that being a public university or a college?

Darrell: That is correct. Most of those land-grant institutions are your very large institutions whether it's Penn State University in Pennsylvania, Rutgers as we have here in New Jersey. Those institutions are open to the public for the public to use.

Pat: I ran into that issue when I was running my business in New Jersey where I wanted to go to a large university hospital. There was one not far from me called Robert Wood Johnson. At the beginning when I was going to Robert Wood Johnson there was no problem of I'm off the street and I'm a nurse. They begin tightening up the access to the library and starting to demand credentials in order to be able to use the library like an employee card, which I clearly didn't have. I wonder if that's a trend or maybe it was just their particular regulations.

Darrell: With Robert Wood Johnson, are they now affiliated with Rutgers?

Pat: They are affiliated with UMDNJ, I think.

Darrell: I think that policy would have changed by now because it's a publically funded university, so you should be able to walk in there to use the facilities.


When I was at Elsevier I ran the Americas for Elsevier and my group did a consortium license for all the academic libraries in New Jersey where they would get access to each other's content. I think it was called the "VAIL Consortium" at the time, but citizens should be able to walk into any of those universities to use those facilities.

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Pat: Could you tell about the trends that you see occurring within the field of doing the type of research that we're talking about?


Darrell: The trends that I see is we know that research is growing 3% to 4% per year. There's a trend of the business model of open access and open access meaning that you can get access to the article and you don't have to pay for it. The author pays the article processing fees for that or the author is sponsored by someone. I think what trend you're going to see is that you're going to see a whole lot more information being available on a particular topic and therefore speaks the challenge.

The challenge is, "How do you discern which is going to be the best research and how do you manage this huge ocean/sea of data?"

That's where I think we have seen a cry and we're going to continue to see a cry from the research community whether it's the nurses, the RF1 researchers or the student body or folks who are matriculating through getting their PhD. There's a desire to have better search and discovery tools that will allow them to recall all of the information, but to do it with precision so that they're getting the right information and context.

I think what we're going to see at some point is what I call "Hypothesis Generated Search", meaning that you will be able to see where two non-occurring terms co-occur in the near future and let me give you an example. If the subject matter was Alzheimer's and you had term A which co-occurred with Alzheimer's and term C has co-occurred in Alzheimer's, but terms A and C have never co-occurred in the scholarly article.

What we're going to see in the near future are tools that are going to allow you to do hypothesis generation where you will be able to see a trend as to when those terms A and C might occur in the near future. Based upon the waiting you will be able to get what we call an early spotlight if you will on maybe you should look at these in terms a little bit more closely because they might be relevant to what you're searching for your research thesis that you're working on.

Pat: I know in the past when you were doing a search and we may be the last generation that will understand the concept of typing a word then a plus sign and another word. One of the trends that I keep seeing is


that you can just ask a question and do a search that way as opposed to figuring out which two terms you want to match up. Could you comment about that?

Darrell: Absolutely and what we're talking about here is artificial intelligence on steroids, which is a good thing. Let's flash forward a few years. We're at the point where you have opted in to allow your personal search engine, which is encrypted and protected so no one can steal what's inside your head, but you're able to share with it all of the searching that you're doing. It's building up really a second brain in the cloud so to speak, so when you do a search it's going to know that you're looking for something very specific and it will be able to bring that back to you.

We're at the early days of that. Watson is probably doing a phenomenal job there. Our platform that we have, Pubs21, if someone was to read an article in the NY Times in the health section on diabetes, they can cut and paste that article in our search engine. We will bring back a results set of peer-reviewed articles that match the relevance in context of that particular article.

What you're suggesting is another two steps away. We are getting even closer where you will be able to speak a computer and say, "I'm not feeling very well today. This is what I ate. Can you tell me what it might be?" It will diagnose it for you based upon everything you've told it, based upon scholarly research, based upon gray literature that's in the marketplace and it will make those connections.

This is a true story. I married my wife Deb in 1993 and two years later I went to play paintball here in New Jersey. I played paintball and had a lot of fun. A couple of months later I'm in Chicago visiting with my wife's family and I noticed that I had these pink blotches right at this bull's-eye. I didn't think anything about it and then I got these pink blotches on my skin. I’m light-skinned, so for me to see there are pink blotches it looks pretty weird, but I ignored it.

I had just joined Elsevier and we were doing our global sales meeting. I was running a 102° temperature, but I took the trip to Amsterdam anyway. I dealt with it during the whole week. I came home, felt


better and then we took a trip to Disney where we took four of our nieces and nephews. We had a great time. We walked the parks and I didn't feel anything. I felt fine. The next day I got back and I couldn't get out of bed. I just figured I was just tired from the trip.

The next day I go to work. I walk up the steps at Penn Station and I felt like I was about to fall out. I got to the office and told my wife. She goes, "Maybe you should just eat something and maybe you will be okay," so that was Wednesday. That Thursday the same thing happened, and I went to the doctor. The doctor said, "Come back on Saturday. Darrell." I went back to see the doctor on Saturday and he says "You know what I got this cardiologist over at Overlook Hospital in Summit. I want you to go visit with him."

Well, when I got to the hospital they were waiting for me. It was the emergency room. It was like an ER scene where clothes were being ripped off and they were asking me a bunch of questions. Finally, they brought in an infectious disease specialist and he says "Let's go back a few months. What have you done differently in your life? Did you do something, an activity?" I then said, "I played paintball." From me telling him I played paintball, he figured out that I got Lyme disease.

Now imagine if we were having all this information and I could verbalize that into a system and it's going to say, "This is what you did? This is what caused that my friend," so we're not that far away from it. I think as we think about the Zika virus and all of that we're going to find that these semantic analytical tools are going to allow us to ingest large amounts of information, make sense of them and then come back with some probable causes and effects.

Pat: You mentioned Pubs21 a couple of times. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that involves?

Darrell: Pubs21 is what I call a semantic search and discovery tool for publishers. Meaning that we're able to allow someone to cut and paste an article into our search box and it will create what we call a "Digital Fingerprint" of that article which we understand the relevance, the importance and the context of that particular article. We will then match that fingerprint against the corpus of data.


Currently with Pubs21 we've ingested all of PubMed, so we can bring back articles from PubMed that will match a particular health article. Now the benefit of that is the preciseness and recall that we're going to bring back articles that are precise in context to your search.

The other thing that Pubs21 does is that if there are 90 pages of results and if you wanted to actually look through all the 90 pages you can do that. What we do is show you the Top 20 articles and then we give you a master fingerprint of the entire results set. This master fingerprint is a visualization of concepts with weighted bars. The larger the bar, the more relevant in context that particular concept is to your search.

It allows folks to see the most important articles, but also concepts on a particular search term that they may recognize or may not recognize which then allows them to do a deeper dive if they choose to do so. From there if a researcher or a user sees a particular article as soon as they click on that article we'll send them over to the publisher's site to get the full text article. If the publisher site recognizes their IP, it will let them right in to get the full text or if it doesn't then they have options to purchase the article.

For the lay person it's really cool because PubMed is a great database and our tax dollars have paid for it, but finding preciseness of search is a challenge. Pubs21 is built on PubMed corpus of data, but it's free and it's free to the public to use. The beautiful thing is that we immediately identify the disease category that the person is searching. I know my pharmaceutical friends are going to love this in hospitals because we can immediately identify consumers and patients of a particular disease category that they can then present their information that's relevant to their particular search.

Pat: As you were talking I was thinking about one of the first times an attorney asked me to do a literature search on some specific aspect related to a personal injury case. I gave him very proudly a three-ring binder that was a three-inch binder and it was filled with articles. I had them broken down and indexed according to topic. He hefted this binder under his arm. He looked at me and said, "Well this is really nice, but all I really wanted was just the most relevant articles." I was


a little crushed and I realized in hindsight I gave him the entire cake and all he wanted was a sliver.

It sounds to me like Pubs21 gives you the sliver, but it's the best part of that cake that relates to what you're looking for.

Darrell: That is correct.

Pat: Is this available now?

Darrell: It's not available now unfortunately. We're on the Amazon Cloud and it's behind a firewall. As folks go to Pubs21 right now they will see a very bad WordPress page, which was supposed to be changed last week. My vendor hasn't changed it yet so I'm going to have to beat them with my wet noodle, but it will be available and we're looking for a launch in the second quarter of this year.

Pat: How can people find out more about you, Darrell?

Darrell: People can Google my name Darrell W. Gunter. I'm on all social media and I'm easy to find. They can also go to my website, which is www.GunterMediaGroup.com and I'm available throughout the web. I also have a radio program called "Leadership with Darrell Gunter," which you can find at iTunes University under Seton Hall University. That show focuses on all the topics around leadership. They can also call me directly at (973) 454-3475.

Pat: Terrific. Thank you so much, Darrell for being on the show. Darrell's first name is spelled D-A-R-R-E-L-L and Gunter is G-U-N-T-E-R. Darrell W. Gunter has been our guest today talking about semantic searches, medical research and how we can harness the power of the computer to make our lives easier when it comes to looking for information. And more directly serve our clients instead of giving them a three-ring binder, giving them links to articles.

Thank you so much, Darrell and I appreciate everybody who's been joining us today and listening to us. Stay tuned for our show next week in which we bring in a new guest and thank you so much for learning from Legal Nurse Podcasts.


Darrell: Thank you.

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researching medical literature for attorneys: new …126...find articles that support their...

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