After yesterday's posting about licensing, etc., I received a message from
Joe Cassels from
Hospital Reps. He talks about a product they offer called
Inforetriever. Thanks, Joe!

Joe says, "InfoPOEMs has followed our advice in offering an
unlimited-use license to institutions. At a certain
price ($9900 large hospital, $7900 Univ/med school or
midsized hospital, $5900 small hospital), the
institution can deploy the system in all of its forms
-Internet, Intranet, desktop, handheld/PocketPC,
handheld/PALM (pieces only), and Daily InfoPOEMs via
e-mail - to all of its faculty, staff, and students,
wherever they may be. As regards the handheld
application(s) specifically, unlimited
downloads/installs with no "locking" or "counting"
software.

Beneath the institutional pricing, there is individual
pricing and group pricing (discounts for
multiple-individual licenses, such as from a Residency
or group practice).

On top of the institutional pricing, there is
multi-facilty pricing (i.e for a large health system)
and consortial discounting.

After 9 years (my group of 6 has 76 years total in the
field of clinical content applications), I firmly
believe in the "no-hassle" unlimited-use pricing as
one purchase option, and strongly encourage purchasers
to pressure everyone else to offer this type of
option."

I will be investigating this with other vendors and will share the results of
my research here. If other vendors wish to share their pricing models, just email me
(lbell927@yahoo.com) and I will post them here. If any of you have experience, let me
know and you can post it or email me and I will post.

There are a number of different models for purchasing. In our
grant project, we are purchasing 4-6 different products for each specialty so that our staff, residents,
and physicians can trial different products. At the end of the project, we hope to know from their point
of view and from a librarian point of view, what the most effective e-books or products are at the point of
care for a clinician.

There seems to be a gold rush on the creation of content for the medical arena for handheld computers.
Some physicians and others have quit their "day jobs" to create applications and content for handhelds.
I have not come up with a "killer app" yet that would earn me the fortune I would like to have.

Having just worked on an e-book project in a higher education setting where there was not enough content,
it was a different ballgame to work on this project in the medical setting where there are literally hundreds
of e-books and applications, varying greatly in quality. There are the standard texts you would expect to
be out there and then there are a lot of guidelines, texts that people have just put into handheld format
for others to use. After this project, we hope from a clinician and a librarian point of view to identify the 1-2
e-books or products which are most helpful at the point of care.

To quote Tom Peters, "pdas are a personal information device." We are loaning out specialty pdas so that
our patrons can try them as a new technology with the content on them. We know as a library that we will
eventually move out of the device business, but how we move into providing content for our library users.
What would be ideal is an anytime, anyplace library we could offer to our users to download and check out
content for their personal information devices. This technology exists because
Skyscape allows users to download a trial version of any of their products and to use the product 15-25 times
before they make a decision to purchase. After that it just doesn't work. NetLibrary had this model with checking
out the book on the web, and then after the due date, the book disappears. Libraries need to figure out a way
to offer materials to our mobile patrons on handheld devices that they can access anytime, anywhere.

I would like to compliment Bill Drew on his wireless library list! He does a great job of moderating and
most recently there have been a lot of great ideas shared among participants about wireless networks in libraries.
I hope that through this blog and list, we can all help each other to create anytime, anywhere libraries for
a more and more mobile society. It would also be helpful if we could help others not to make the same
mistakes we have made. I learn everything the hard way, so I am very willing to share my experiences.
I would also appreciate any experiences others have had so that I don't make the same mistakes. If there
are mistakes to be made and learned from, I make them!