Wolters Kluwer Health introduced today CEConnection for employer-provided continuing education (CE) content from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) supporting nursing and new for allied health professionals. CEConnection.com, an online CE platform offers institutions peer-reviewed, high quality content from LWW journals and products that make it easy to offer and track CE course completion by practitioners. Previously, CEConnection was available for individual and institutional nurses.

“We’re pleased to enhance our CEConnection solution for allied health professionals who need convenient, easy-to-use online CE courses to fulfill their professional development needs,” said Jayne Marks, Vice President Publishing at Wolters Kluwer Health Medical Research. “CEConnection helps institutions recruit, retain, and develop allied health and nursing staff skills by giving them a convenient and affordable way to improve their professional knowledge.”

Key features of the CEConnection.com platform include:

· Customizable catalog of activities allowing institutions to purchase activities for one or more professions

· Monthly update of new activities

· Listings browsable by profession, clinical category, topic and specialty

· A new CE Planner enabling users to track their personal CE needs and completed activities accessible both during and post employment

· Activity assignment and usage tracking for institutional administrators

New for allied health practitioners, CEConnection offers the widest variety of hospital-based CE all in one place including CE for behavioral/psychiatric health professionals—often difficult to find from a single provider. Course material will be updated monthly and is currently offered for the following allied health specialties:
Cardiovascular Technician
Case Manager
Clinical Laboratory Science
Dietician
Health Care Quality Professional
Pharmacist
· Speech-language Pathologist

Visit www.CEConnection.com to schedule a demo today.

Bassam Z. Shakhashiri, Ph.D., president of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, comments on today’s award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D., of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C., and Brian K. Kobilka, M.D., of Stanford University School of Medicine, in Stanford, Calif. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize for studies of G-protein–coupled receptors.

“As president of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, I am delighted to congratulate the new laureates on behalf of our more than 164,000 members. They have made tremendous strides in our understanding of health and disease. Almost half of all prescription medications work through the mechanisms that Lefkowitz and Kobilka have explored. The resulting insights are helping us develop new medicines for combatting disease, one of the great global challenges facing humanity.”

Lefkowitz has published more than 22 papers in ACS’ suite of peer-reviewed scientific journals, including Biochemistry and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, and Kobilka has published results of his research in Biochemistry and Analytical Chemistry.

News media can arrange telephone interviews with Shakhashiri or ACS immediate past-president Nancy Jackson, Ph.D., through the ACS Office of Public Affairs contacts listed at the top of this page. Jackson is manager of the International Chemical Threat Reduction Department in the Global Security Center at Sandia National Laboratories.

Shakhashiri is 2012 president of the American Chemical Society. The William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is former assistant director of the National Science Foundation for Science and Engineering Education and internationally noted for leadership in promoting excellence in science education. The Encyclopedia Britannica cites him as the “dean of lecture demonstrators in America.” Shakhashiri’s scholarly publications include the multi-volume series Chemical Demonstrations: A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry. He founded and directs the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy.

Knowledge Base+ is a new shared service from JISC Collections that aims to help UK libraries manage their e-resources more efficiently.

KB+ is being established to start addressing the challenges facing libraries due to the inadequate data and metadata about publications, packages, subscriptions, entitlements and licences that is available throughout the e-resource supply chain.

The result is that libraries are spending too much time correcting and maintaining basic e-resource information and not enough time is left to undertake the sort of decision making that they would like to be conducting to improve services for users.

Sara Marsh, Director of Learner Support Services at the University of Bradford and Chair of SCONUL says: “The release of Phase 1 of KB+ is the realisation of many years’ partnership working between SCONUL and JISC. It’s a genuine example of a community-owned shared service which has been informed and developed from the start by practitioners who recognised a problem and set out to find a shared solution. I’m delighted to see the service now being launched, and SCONUL looks forward to building on this initial phase as the service is developed further over the course of 2012 and 2013.”

JISC Collections has been leading this work on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and JISC, drawing on its own knowledge and experience and the work of SCONUL and JISC to identify the shared e-resource management needs of UK academic institutions.

Richard Parsons, Director of the LLC and University Librarian at University of Dundee, says: “KB+ is planned to be used to manage the data across the consortium to permit substantial efficiency gains within the institutions. It will dramatically improve the accuracy, utility, maintenance and confidence of our subscription data. Correctly implemented we would expect to see some operations completed once for all 19 institutions in SHEDL.”

In addition to saving time and cost, KB+ will also provide benefits including:

Improving the reliability of the e-library – making better quality and more accurate information available to the services that libraries use will improve the quality of service that libraries provide to their end users
Ensuring the value of vendor knowledge bases that drive library systems, by improving the supply and quality of data that goes into vendor knowledge bases, libraries will benefit from an improved return on the investment they make in those systems
Putting institutions in control of their data across systems and services – providing one central source of institutional data that is shared across all stakeholders as required.
Nicholas Lewis, Library Director at UEA, comments: “We anticipate that KB+ will have a marked impact on the way in which we manage our electronic collections, not just within the university, but also in our day-to-day liaison with publishers, vendors and agents. To this end, we are reviewing our workflows to take full advantage of KB+ from day one and look forward to seeing how it develops to more fully to meet the community’s needs in the months ahead.”

Wolters Kluwer, announced today that Mr. J.J. Lynch, Jr., Member of the Executive Board, has accepted an offer to become CEO of a company in the U.S. software and information industry. The company does not compete with Wolters Kluwer. As a consequence, Mr. Lynch will resign from the Wolters Kluwer Executive Board per November 2012. For the interim, Mr. Lynch’s responsibilities will be taken over by the CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, Nancy McKinstry.

Nancy McKinstry, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board, commented: “Jack’s vision for software development and innovation, as well as his business acumen, have strongly supported the work of the Executive Board and Wolters Kluwer’s transformation towards a global information services company. I fully respect Jack’s decision and wish him all the best in his new position.”

Jack Lynch joined Wolters Kluwer in 2006, and became a member of the Wolters Kluwer Executive Board in April 2007. Mr. Lynch has played an important role over the past six years in leading Wolters Kluwer’s shared services, supporting the company’s strategy and global organization. He also drove the maturity of the global technology platform that enables the company to develop software and mobile products tailored to the needs of its customers.

In addition, Mr. Lynch was responsible for the execution of the operational excellence program, Springboard, completed at the end of 2011. Springboard resulted in the creation of global capabilities, increased efficiencies and improved the company’s back-office performance.

During the interim period the CEO of the Global Shared Services Organization, Tom Lesica, and the Executive Vice President of the Global Platform Organization, Dennis Cahill, will report to Nancy McKinstry. The succession of Mr. Lynch on the Executive Board of Wolters Kluwer is currently under review.