A promotional view of the Kortext platform. Image: Kortext
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Linking Research, Patients, and Health-Care Professionals’
Based in Basel, Karger Publishers is a 133-year-old international publisher of scientific and medical content—for four generations a family-led independent house with Gabriella Karger serving as publisher and chair.
Kortext is a British digital-educational content company with a broad international presence that includes teams in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates.
And the National Health Service, of course, is the United Kingdom’s state health-care program. At issue in today’s news (August2 29) is NHS-England.
How these three entities come to be associated with each other is through a project to provide Karger’s medical research—through its Fast Facts handbook product—using Kortext’s digital publishing platform, which can make the Fast Facts ebooks collection immediately available throughout NHS-England’s staff.
The effort is to supply free access to the 130+ resources in its Fast Facts series, handbooks said to deal with “knowledge gaps in health care, thereby making medical content more visible and understandable to health-care professionals, patients, and other stakeholders.”
Kortext’s platform is a digital library for the medical community, ready to be accessed by NHS’s staff which comprises reportedly some 1.2 million employees.
And even for the companies involved, the scale of this project is big, this being the first time that Karger, Kortext, and the NHS have collaborated on something of this complexity.
Geoff Covey
In a prepared statement, Geoff Covey, who heads up the health-care markets division at Karger, says, “The purpose of our Fast Facts series is to support health-care professionals in their daily lives by disseminating the latest research findings in an easy-to-read format. To share this series with NHS-England is a great honor.
“We make sure we put clinicians and their patients at the center of our publications. By serving as a trusted resource, we link research, patients, and health-care professionals together.”
At Kortext, Ronan Grimes, the senior manager for publisher services, says that the company sees hosting the Karger Fast Facts series is a way of “adding another layer of teaching and learning tools to enhance the learning experience on our smart platform.“
More from Publishing Perspectives on academic, scholarly, and research publishing is here, more on the United Kingdom market is here, and more on the Swiss market is here.