About the Authors

Dan Doody

(Left to right: Mark Beck, Dan Doody and Rich Lampert)

HI, I’m Dan Doody and I have been in the health sciences publishing business for 33 years. For the first 15 years, I worked for large book and journal publishing companies in medicine and nursing. In January 1993 I started my own health sciences publishing company, Doody Enterprises, Inc. (DEI). My passion is to provide healthcare professionals with a personalized literature update service that saves them time, time they can channel into more contact with their patients. I have also had a long-standing interest in the interaction between the healthcare professional and her / his patient, convinced that this is the most important element in successful delivery of optimal healthcare. I’ve been married to Carol Armbrust since 1976, and we have three grown children and our first grandchild. Awesome! My extended family includes 4 brothers, 2 sisters, 18 inlaws, and 70 phenomenal nieces and nephews. I am so fortunate to work with each member of the talented and dedicated team at Doody Enterprises. I enjoy riding my bike to work every day (when the Chicago weather permits) and really appreciate that the health club where I exercise every day is just three storefronts from our office. I am a lifelong sports fan – Notre Dame football (my alma mater) and all Chicago sports teams, including the Chicago Blackhawks. And did you hear that the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup in 2010? Woo, woo!

Anne Hennessy

As editor in chief, I am the lucky one who gets to work with the healthcare professionals and medical librarians who contribute the content for MedInfoNow, Doody’s Review Service and Doody’s Core Titles. They are an amazing group of accomplished and busy professionals who volunteer their time because they believe in the importance of evaluating and filtering the vast amount of information that inundates their inboxes. As Lucille Ball famously said, “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”

First, there are the100+ Editorial Review Group Chairs – many are department chairs at their academic institutions — who are responsible for getting reviews of books/software in the 140 specialties we cover in basic science, clinical medicine, nursing and allied health. They, in turn, have recruited hundreds of health sciences professionals who review some 1,600 titles a year! Then, we have over 100 librarians who volunteer their time each year to select and score books for Doody’s Core Titles, a collection development tool that helps medical and hospital librarians make their buying decisions. Did I mention they are all volunteers? Finally, we contract with librarians who are experts in searching the biomedical literature to come up with the topics and search strategies that make zeroing in on the most relevant journal articles a snap for MedInfoNow users.

On top of all that, I have the great good fortune of working with a team of dedicated, creative, innovative people – who also happen to be a lot of fun. That, and they tolerate my hopeless attachment to the Cubs and my love of Irish music.

Steve Haiman

Hi, I’m Steve Haiman, the technology lead at MedinfoNow. I’ve been cranking out code since the start of the company in 1993. For you techie readers, we use a mix of C#, ASP.NET, PHP, AJAX and a number of other acronyms and use several database back ends. Write me at steve@doody.com if you have any questions about our architecture or software.

Most of our software is home grown, especially our online review system and the MedinfoNowsearch systems. However we do use a number of web platforms such as the open source DotNetNuke for Doody.com and SharePoint for our intranet content management system. We are very excited about social media, and all things Web 2.0. Our systems interface with Twitter and Facebook, with more links to come. We’re busy at work on our next release of MedinfoNow, which we hope to launch late September.

On the personal side, I love sailing, running, biking, and hanging out with Nancy my wife of 28 years, and our son Ben who lives in Washington DC and works for the DC police force. My other big passion is all things technology, especially learning more each day software development techniques and languages. We at MedinfoNow are very excited about our web platforms, and look forward to hearing from you, our readers, on how we can improve our products even more to fit your needs.

Rich Lampert

(Left to right: Anne Hennessy, Rich Lampert, and Dan Doody)

I’m Rich Lampert. While studying engineering in college, I took what I thought was a quick detour into a summer job with a medical publishing company, and well over three decades later I’m still at it. For most of my career, I worked directly with the authors of books in medicine and other health sciences – identifying top talents, encouraging them to think about writing important books, and then cajoling them to keep at it in the face of other demands on their time. The great pleasure in these relationships was listening to the top minds in health sciences talk about their disciplines as they developed their writing plans. Among the most memorable were Jack Pritchard, who wrote a number of editions of the great “Williams Obstetrics” with a single co-author; and Bob Rutherford, who virtually invented the notion of vascular surgery as a specialty through his research, clinical care, and devoted mentoring of two generations of young talent. Another great pleasure was talking to customers who read and valued the books I helped to publish – everyone from students who were happy to pass their exams, to specialists from all over the world who have relied on a book I helped to develop. For the last few years, I’ve been a consultant helping publishing companies and professional societies deal with publishing business challenges, and it’s been gratifying to see that my insights about publishing have been helpful to a couple dozen publishing operations of all kinds. These days, my typical commute is 14 steps from the breakfast table to World Headquarters.

Adam Doody

Hi, I’m Adam Doody. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the team at DEI as a researcher, marketer, and collaborator. My father, Dan Doody, started DEI seventeen years ago, and it is a great thrill for me to be involved with the family business. The team at DEI is a talented and fun group of people to work with. I have a keen interest in the opportunity for my generation to influence what will hopefully be a dramatic improvement in the way healthcare is administered in the US and abroad. Specifically, I am fascinated and excited by the role that emerging information technology will play in this healthcare revolution. When I’m not researching new trends in healthcare and information technology, I enjoy hiking, climbing, skiing, backpacking, kayaking, and biking in the mountains and waterways around Seattle, WA where I live. I am also a photographer working on several different projects, including an exciting and unique project where I teach photography classes to adults recovering from homelessness and addiction, http://www.pathwithart.org/.

Mark Beck

Hi, my name is Mark Beck and I have been working at Doody Enterprises, Inc. (DEI) since August of 2009. I graduated from Augustana College with a Bachelors degree in Biology and a minor in Environmental Studies. I played both football and lacrosse in college and I enjoy all sports including fishing. I have two older sisters, one younger brother and one yellow lab. I enjoy working at DEI because I am surrounded by honest and hardworking people and I also get to preview some of the latest advances in the health sciences. I am applying for dental school for the fall of 2011 and I also work in a dental office in Wheaton, IL. I am currently involved with the advertising on all of DEI’s websites, organization of new title information, our customer service and shipping new titles to our reviewers.