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04. Sep 2010

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CISMeF (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources), Rouen, France

The project CISMeF is located at the Rouen University Hospital. Rouen University Hospital is the second largest employer in the region of Haute-Normandie, with 7400 personnel including 1300 medical staff (doctors, medical assistants, interns and students in medicine and pharmacy). In 2001, the University Hospital received 550 interns and residents. Rouen University Hospital plays a major role in the French medical system: it is the 8th largest University Hospital in numbers of short-term beds, and the 10th largest University Hospital in numbers of short-term admissions (out of the 26 French University Hospitals, excluding overseas University Hospitals and Paris Public Assistance).

Rouen University Hospital is the central component of the regional medical system.
Under this system, the region of Haute-Normandie has been divided into four medical sectors:

the Seine river and plateau sector,

the Eure and Seine river sector,

the Estuary sector,

the Caux seaboard region.

Rouen University Hospital is located in the Seine river and plateau sector. In addition to providing medical treatment, its purpose is to develop research, to perform specific, high-cost medical operations such as transplants, intracranial neurosurgery, cardiac surgery with extra-corporeal circulation and neonatal surgery.
It is also the principal training centre for medical and paramedical practitioners in the region.

The objective of CISMeF (French acronym for Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) (Darmoni et al., 2000; Darmoni et al., 1999; Darmoni and Thirion, 2000) is to describe and index the main French-language health resources to assist health professionals and consumers in their search for electronic information available on the Internet. CISMeF is a quality-controlled subject gateway originally initiated by Rouen University Hospital (RUH).
CISMeF began in February 1995 after the creation of the RUH's Web site. In March 2002, the number of indexed resources totaled over 9,500, with an average of 50 new resources indexed each week.

CISMeF describes and indexes a large number of health resources. The main health areas of the indexed resources in CISMeF are:

Evidence Based Medicine (n>700);

Teaching (n>1,500)

Information for the patients and the general public (n>700).

CISMeF uses two standard tools for organizing information: a controlled vocabulary which 'encapsulates' the US-National Library of Medicine MeSH thesaurus. We also use (or will use) an element set of metadata based on several metadata element sets:

(a) the Dublin Core metadata format to describe and index all the health resources included in CISMeF [2],
(b) some elements from IEEE1484 Learning Object Metadata for teaching resources,
(c) specific metadata for evidenced-base medicine resources which also qualify the health content, and
(d) the HIDDEL metadata set will be used to enhance transparency, trust and quality of health information on the Internet in the EU-funded MedCIRCLE project.

Resources included in CISMeF are described according to the following elements of the Dublin Core: title, author or creator, subject and keywords, description, publisher, date, resource type, format, identifier, contributor and language. The following fields are specific to CISMeF: institution, city, province or state, country, target, cost of access, type of sponsorship.
The information structure model of CISMeF 'encapsulates' the MeSH thesaurus with two semantic levels: meta-terms and resource types. The objective of Doc'CISMeF (D'C) was to create a powerful generic search tool based on the same structured information model.

The first prototype version of D'C has been available on line since June 2000. To index resources, D'C uses four sections in its information model: 'meta-term', keyword, subheading, and resource type.
In order to include only reliable resources, D'C and CISMeF uses the main criteria (e.g. source, disclosure, last update) of Net Scoring to assess the quality of health information on the Internet. There are 49 criteria which fall into eight categories:

credibility,

content,

hyperlinks,

design,

interactivity,

quantitative aspects,

ethics

accessibility

Click here to read the list of all criteria.

Every criterion is rated 0 if it is very bad, 1 if it is bad, 2 if it is good and 3 if it is very good. Every criterion is a weighted: 3 if it is essential, 2 if it is important and 1 if it is minor. The total of these weighted criteria produces the overall score of a site (maximum = 299). All the criteria were chosen by expert consensus. Some resources are not introduced in D'C and CISMeF because they do not respect basic, particularly ethical, criteria.
CISMeF uses a rigorous four-fold process to build the catalogue: resource collection, selection, description and index. Health resources to be included in CISMeF are selected according to the main criteria of the Net Scoring initiative (source of information, disclosure, editorial review process, date of last update, and mechanism for feedback). Net Scoring is in use by many prominent French health institutions]. Resources that do not respect basic, particularly ethical, criteria are not included in the CISMeF database.
CISMeF is the first Web catalogue to explicitly indicate the level of evidence of indexed documents. CISMeF also includes a search tool named Doc'CISMeF which may limit any request to documents which explicitly mention the level of evidence.

For more information about CISMeF, click here.

Contact Information:

SJ. Darmoni, MD, PhD
Advanced Technologies Manager, Computing and Networks Department,
Rouen University Hospital, 1 rue de Germont, 76031 Rouen Cedex, France
Associate Professor of Medical Informatics, Rouen Medical School
Tel: +33.232.88.88.29; Fax: +33.232.88.88.32;
Email: Stefan.Darmoni@chu-rouen.fr;
Web: www.chu-rouen.fr &
www.univ-rouen.fr/medecine

(french version)

(Last update: 2002-07-03)