June 26, 2008
Ellen Howard honored with 2008 DeBakey Outreach Award
Ellen Howard, UW Health Sciences librarian at Harborview and UW medical centers, has received the prestigious Michael E. DeBakey Outreach Services award.
The award, given annually, is named for Dr. DeBakey, an eminent heart surgeon and longtime supporter and advocate for the National Library of Medicine and for the critical role of librarians in health care.
The award was presented to Howard at the annual meeting of the Friends of the National Library of Medicine on May 13 in Washington, D.C.
The award — which is given for outstanding service to rural or underserved communities — was established by DeBakey in the early 1990s to recognize the contributions to medical education and librarianship and to honor a practicing health sciences librarian who serves in such a community. As one of the many support letters for Howard stated, “Ellen epitomizes the qualities and characteristics of a DeBakey awardee.”
Howard is well known for her work in creating EthnoMed (http://ethnomed.org), which contains a wealth of original information kept in the public domain about cultural beliefs, medical issues and matters pertinent to the health care of recent immigrants to the Seattle area, many of whom are refugees fleeing war-torn parts of the world.
Some information is specific to groups in Seattle; most is applicable to other geographic areas. Users may browse the available materials by cultural group, disease or other general topic category, or they may elect to search the Web site in its entirety for specific topics.
Profiles of cultures and health topics, and translated health information are available for Cambodian, Chinese, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Hispanic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrean, and Vietnamese patients and their care providers. EthnoMed directly supports those working on the front lines of reducing health disparities with high-risk patients.
In the early ’90s, the Web opened up for practical applications at the UW.
At that time, the Health Sciences Center was involved in the National Library of Medicine’s IAIMS (Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems) program. Howard seized the opportunity to use the Web to locally create and share information among providers, support staff and the refugee/immigrant communities being served by Harborview. This allowed the sharing of information nationally as well as locally. Dr. J. Carey Jackson, director of the International Medicine Clinic at Harborview, agreed, and so in 1994, Howard led the effort to develop EthnoMed.
In 2000, she began working on projects related to American Indians/Alaska Natives.
At that time, she was invited by Dr. Dedra Buchwald, UW professor of medicine, to teach a course on informatics to a cohort of professionals in the Native Investigator Development program at the Health Sciences Center of University of Colorado Denver, which she continues to do every two years.
Another recent opportunity has been Howard’s outreach to the Lummi tribe in Washington’s Whatcom County. Currently, she is helping to broaden information access for the Lummi Health Center, but soon hopes to work with youth and get involved in intergenerational programs.
