An Interview with Dr. Russ Maulitz

askSam on Laptops in University Medical Program

Associate Professor of Family Medicine

Allegheny University of the Health Sciences - Philadelphia PA

Reprinted with Permission

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askSam:  Dr. Maulitz, would you describe your role as an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at Allegheny University?

Dr. Maulitz:   Sure.  I spend half of my time as a consumer of information management and information services as a Primary Care Internist although I work primarily with the family physicians.  The other half of my time, I serve as a provider of computer services and information services which I do with my family medicine colleagues by way of helping them make their Clerkship in Family Medicine.  The Clerkship is a required third year medical school course enriched by the use of laptop computers that run askSam as the central kind of switch board or clearinghouse for information that we want to provide for them.  The course also allows them to plug information in from other sources so askSam is kind of the hub of a series of mainly off-the-shelf applications.  Some of the applications require the student dial up to online databases and some resident on their laptop computers.   The way we see the overall project, which we call CyberDoc, is basically that of it being a mechanism for leveling the playing field for students who are going to be working with doctors in communities that do not have big libraries like they would have if they were working and taking a course based at a hospital.  The laptop computer combined with askSam and some other bells and whistles that we add to it, works together to equalize the student's access to information.

askSam:  How long have you been using askSam as part of this program?

Dr. Maulitz: We've been using askSam since July 1995.  We began with Version 2.0 and now we are using askSam for Windows 3.0.

askSam:  As you think back, how has askSam made your job any easier or more efficient than other methods you have used in the past as an educator?

Dr. Maulitz:   Well, we needed a very particular type of tool that would allow us to teach.  The tool needed to do two things at once.  It would have to enable us to teach our students to become more computer literate and at the same time provide a show case for information we needed them to have.  We wanted them to learn to use a graphical user interface so it needed to be Windows based.  It also needed to be local on the computers, that is to say, we couldn't just put up a bunch of World Wide Web pages and give them an Internet service provider account for all kinds of reasons that you could imagine ranging from the cost of doing that dollar wise to the cost of doing it in remote teaching sites.  I mean if a student is taking their laptop computer to an office that doesn't even have a telephone, they might not even have a electrical outlet where they can plug it in either.  In this case, the student has to use a laptop with a battery.

When selecting software, we couldn't find anything other than askSam that would swing both ways in that it had to be very graphical and also offer hypertext the way askSam does. askSam allowed us to provide a vehicle for the information.  For example, if we had put everything in a word processor and stored it on a hard drive, we would have had less functionality in terms of links between documents and in terms of the reporting capabilities.

askSam: Are there any other details of your program that you care to add?

Dr. Maulitz:   Beginning with this academic year, July 1996, we now require students to do an exercise in askSam that they were doing all along.  Students must put some of their patients into askSam.  These are what we call write ups or work ups of individual patients.  askSam becomes the vehicle for that.  I will tell you that the database capabilities of askSam are very useful from the stand point of recording the patient write ups.  A typical patient write up has four parts and each part corresponds to a field in an askSam document.  It is much easier to break out the parts using askSam rather than having the information stored in a word processor file.  Students also use the askSam search features a lot.  Again, we could have searched word processing documents, but askSam just gives us a little extra umph!

askSam:   We are certainly glad that askSam is being put to good use within your educational program.  Speaking of education, are you aware of the askSam Educational Licensing Program?

Dr. Maulitz:  No, I am not aware of that.

askSam:   I'll have Phil Schnyder < phil@asksam.com > contact you with the details.  The askSam Education Licensing Program offers you the use of all of our products for a low-cost annual fee.  

Dr. Maulitz:  We are so happy with what we are doing certainly through this academic year that we will continue with what we've got; but for 1997-1998 and beyond we're looking at a variety of options.

askSam: I might mention the fact that information about the askSam Education License Program is also available on the askSam Web site.   By the way, have you needed customer support from our company?

Dr. Maulitz: We haven't needed support lately; however, we needed a lot of it early on and you folks were very helpful.  I can sing their praises especially of Wade Goodman who worked with me the most.  Is he still around?

askSam:  Yes, Wade is still with askSam Systems; however, he is now in Sales and specializes in working with customers who need the askSam Resume Tracking System.   Feel free to contact Wade via email, < wade@asksam.com >     Dr. Maulitz, here's one last question. Would you recommend askSam to your colleagues and students and if so, why?

Dr. Maulitz:   I would recommend askSam for certain kinds of functions and I mean the traditional askSam.  I am not familiar with all of the other askSam products.   I would recommend askSam for anybody who has a project like CyberDoc.  Whether or not I would recommend it three, four, five years from now is going to depend a lot on where all kinds of new ideas and new platforms including the Internet manage to move.  You know I would certainly recommend it as it has served its purpose very well for us.  I should mention that if you want to see more about our project and the praise that it had been given, you can refer to the December 1996 issue of Academic Medicine.    Even more important, there is an editorial that precedes the article by Dr. Friedman from the University of Pittsburgh, that attests to the importance of our project. We couldn't have asked for a nicer appraisal.

askSam: Thank you for your time and for mentioning the article in Academic Computing that refers to your project, CyberDoc.  We will acquire a copy from the publisher and will reference it in our Press / Reviews and Articles section of the askSam Web site.  

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Dr. Russ Maulitz, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Family Medicine

Allegheny University of the Health Sciences

2414 Spruce Street

Philadelphia PA 10103

Email: maulitzr@allegheny.edu

http://www.allegheny.edu