INFORMATION UPDATE "Helping Businesses Find the Facts" March, 2001 Number 19 A Monthly Publication of Shamel Information Services mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com ============================================================ Welcome to INFORMATION UPDATE, the free monthly newsletter for business and healthcare professionals. For subscription information, refer to notes at the end of this newsletter. ============================================================ ------------------------------------------------------------ IN THIS ISSUE ------------------------------------------------------------ => DO IT YOURSELF - Searching for Associations => DID YOU KNOW - Medicare Reimbursement Rates => Notes, News and Announcements => Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information ------------------------------------------------------------ DO IT YOURSELF - Searching for Associations ------------------------------------------------------------ Who wants to search for associations? No doubt most of us belong to all of the associations we can manage at the moment. Well, we're not talking about searching for new associations to join. We're talking about identifying organizations so that we can tap into their expertise. Contacting relevant associations is a tried and true method among research librarians for locating experts with reliable information. The Gale Encyclopedia of Associations, avail- able at most libraries, has long been used for this purpose. The Encyclopedia contains over 23,000 national and inter- national organizations. Associations are indexed by name and by keyword. The I Hate Barney Secret Society isn't as secret as its members think, since it's clearly listed in the Encyclopedia. An Internet option for locating associations concerned with your topic is the American Society of Association Executives. At the ASAE web site http://www.asaenet.org/main/ you can use their gateway to over 6,500 associations. Suppose that you need reliable industry and medical statistics on allergy and asthma. The ASAE lets you search its members from their site at http://info.asaenet.org/Gateway/OnlineAssocSlist.html Enter the word 'asthma' in the "association name contains" and get three very good entries. The American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology has excellent resources. Enter 'device' in the search box, and you locate the Medical Device Manufacturers Association, among others. You can also chose a category of interest and receive a list of all the associations falling in that category. "Pharmacy/ Pharmaceutical" lists 46 associations, local and national. Next time you have a question, consider the collective know- ledge of an association. Search the Gale Encyclopedia of Associations or the ASAE web site. You may be able to identify a group of experts just itching to tell you what they know. Let's see, there's the American Ivy Society, the Mosquito Association, the Backscratchers Club of America... ------------------------------------------------------------ DID YOU KNOW - Reimbursement Rates ------------------------------------------------------------ If you need information about Medicare reimbursement rates for healthcare, you are definitely not alone. If you have tried to search the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Care Financing Administration for this kind of information, you're not alone there either. If you actually found the reimbursement rates you needed and felt confident about your results, well, you just might be alone there! At Shamel Information Services we can help you obtain the reimbursement rate information you seek. We work with a number of vendors who have compiled this information and arranged it geographically and by CPT code to ensure a useful number. If you've given up on searching the HCFA web site, give us a call, and we'll find what you need - frustration free. ------------------------------------------------------------ Notes, News, and Announcements ------------------------------------------------------------ Can you imagine this? Despair, Inc. has trademarked the emoticon we usually call the 'frowny face' that looks like this :-( One would think that this is a hoax or an urban legend, but here's the reference from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=75502288 And here's what the Despair, Inc. people have to say: At a press conference, Despair's COO, Dr. E.L.Kersten, announced his intentions to sue "anyone and everyone who uses the so-called 'frowny' emoticon, or our trademarked logo, in their written email correspondence. Ever." http://www.despair.com/demotivators/frownonthis.html They seem to mean business. Apparently we use the :-( at our own risk. ============================================================ Conferences and Meetings Coming Up: March 30 8:30 am to 4:00 pm at the Radisson La Jolla in San Diego, California Special Libraries Association, San Diego Chapter Spring Seminar New World...Familiar Ground: Application of Metadata Using Library Principles and Methods. For more information visit the chapter web site http://www.sla.org/chapter/csnd/ April 19-22 Network in New Orleans with the Association of Independent Information Professionals. http://www.aiip.org ============================================================= Information Update articles are now searchable on the web. Visit http://www.shamelinfo.com and click on "Newsletters." From that page you can enter your search terms to locate articles from past issues of Information Update. Give it a try and let us know what you think. The Shamel Information Services web site at http://shamelinfo.com contains Information Update archives. Just click on "Newsletters" and check for any issues you might have missed. -------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE -------------------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions to INFORMATION UPDATE are free. You may subscribe or unsubscribe by sending a message to: mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com with SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Copyright 2001 Shamel Information Services Please feel free to forward this issue to colleagues, in its entirety. Other uses without permission may violate copyright. Online archives at http://www.shamelinfo.com/newsletter.htm =============================================================== Cynthia L. Shamel, editor Shamel Information Services Poway, California mailto:cshamel@shamelinfo.com Ms. Shamel is on the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Information Professionals http://www.aiip.org, a Special Libraries Association, San Diego Chapter Director and a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals http://www.scip.org Telephone: 858-673-4673 Toll Free: 800-330-9939