An interview with the Meister
This is the second in our series of interviews with prominent personalities in the world of Medical PDA computing. I am sure many of you will be familiar with Meistermed and the iSilo Depot which is a great collection of medical references in iSilo format. If you are wondering who the Meister is, wonder no more as we bring you the Palmdoc Chronicles interview with Andrew “The Meister” Schechtman:
PD: Could you tell us a bit about yourself – your background, training, work experience and how you ended up being involved in the medical publishing business?
AS: I’m a family physician based in San Jose, California. I see patients and serve on the faculty of the San Jose – O’Connor Hospital Family Medicine Residency program. Since finishing residency 11 years ago, I’ve worked in several settings: I worked in single-doctor emergency rooms in rural Louisiana; I served on the faculty of a family medicine residency program in New Orleans; and I volunteered for projects with Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors without Borders in Uganda, Guatemala, and Liberia. I first started using a PDA (a Cassiopeia WinCE device) when I was working in rural ER’s back in 1998. Over several years, I’d assembled all of my medical notes into hundreds of Word documents. With the advent of the PDA, I could finally have these references accessible on the fly. I decided it would be great if I could share some of these medical references with others. That was the beginning of FPPalm.com in 2000, which was re-christened as MeisterMed about a year later.
PD: Was it easy/difficult to start MeisterMed? What obstacles did you face when you first started?
AS :Starting MeisterMed was as easy as putting up a basic website and posting some medical PDA files for people to download. Since then, MeisterMed has grown a lot – developing many more titles in the Meister series as well as other medical references, building its online store, and creating the Medical iSilo(tm) Depot (the largest repository of medical iSilo(tm) references on the web). The biggest obstacle has been making time for MeisterMed alongside my other professional pursuits. It was particularly challenging keeping everything running smoothly during my year in Liberia with Medecins sans Frontieres/Doctors without Borders. I was lucky if I got Internet access once a month and then the connection was worse than bad dial-up.
PD : What made you go with iSilo rather than Mobipocket?
AS : I started developing medical references for the iSilo platform when I realized how well it handled multi-paged documents by compiling them into a single file. I didn’t learn about Mobipocket until a few years after I’d been working with the iSilo platform. When I tried to convert some of the Meister references for Mobipocket, I discovered that Mobipocket had some limitations that impaired its ability to work with very complicated documents like those in the Meister series. Some of our references are composed of thousands of pages and tens of thousands of integrated hyperlinks. It would have been very tedious and time intensive to adapt and maintain the Meister references for Mobipocket. I try to keep the tedious and less fun parts of my MeisterMed work to a minimum.
PD : Any plans for publishing in other platforms?
AS : We are constantly looking at other options for publishing our medical references to make them as accessible to as many medical PDA users as possible. We’ve published a free online version of LyteMeister designed for wireless PDA and iPhone users and have plans for more releases for these platforms. A web-based version of ICDMeister, our popular ICD-9 coding reference, is under development with an anticipated release date in early 2008. For non-Internet based content, we are very satisfied with the power of the iSilo platform and the continued evolution of this product. The recent release of iSilo version 5 now adds the ability to annotate, highlight, and add comments to a document. For medical PDA users, I think iSilo will remain the reader of choice for a long time to come.
PD : The PDA market is seen as mature and possibly stagnating. How do you perceive this? Is the medical publishing business also maturing or still growing fast (possibly because of the migration from PDAs to convergence i.e. smartphones)
AS : With the growing adoption of EMRs bringing computers and Internet access into the exam room, some docs are needing their PDAs less often. I think there will always be a role for PDAs as a portable information resource when doctors are on the move or away from a desktop computer. I think that in the not-too-distant future, most of the content will be online rather than based on the PDA and it will be accessed via wireless Internet. The other part of the question is about the evolution of medical publishing for PDAs. Now you can find almost any standard medical textbook in a PDA format. I would love to carry tons of medical textbooks on my PDA but they’re just too expensive (sometimes costing more than the printed textbook). On top of that, some now require you to pay a premium fee if you need to re-download your product after a certain period of time. I’m really disappointed with the big players in PDA medical publishing. What’s with all the barriers? Why not charge a fair price, pass on some of the savings resulting from not needing to print a big, physical book, and get these great references into the hands of as many doctors as possible? Electronic distribution is close to free. The core of MeisterMed’s mission is to get quality, point-of-care medical references into the hands of as many practitioners as possible including those working in countries where the doctors aren’t paid well enough to cough up a lot of money for references. We’ve been able to keep all of our clinical references free of charge (with the sole exception of STD 2006 which sells for under $6). As you can imagine, free products don’t generate revenue. The satisfaction comes from knowing that tens of thousands of medical practitioners across more than 100 countries are using tools like DermMeister and LyteMeister to provide better care to their patients.
PD : What are your personal favorite PDAs/devices/mobile platforms?
AS : I really liked my Palm T:X but it died on me after only a year. Now I’m using a Treo 680. It’s not the best PDA and it’s not the best cell phone but it’s sure nice carrying one less gadget on my belt. I’m hoping Palm’s next generation of PDA/phones includes a faster processor and WiFi.
PD : Do you have any advice for anyone thinking of writing their own ebooks or venturing into the medical e-publishing world?
AS : One of my goals in establishing the Medical iSilo(tm) Depot was to encourage doctors to create their own medical references and to share them with everyone else. Unfortunately, few authors have been submitting their work. I’ve been lecturing at national medical conferences for the past several years teaching people how to make their own iSilo references and am planning to publish an online version of this presentation on MeisterMed in the next several months. MeisterMed currently has a tutorial with step-by-step instructions for creating an iSilo reference. It’s a bit long in the tooth but is still a good starting point for those interested in making their own PDA references.
PD : Any future plans for Meistermed?
AS : We’re going to be focusing on building more online content to accommodate the move towards wireless access of medical information. We also have several new medical references in the pipeline coming in 2008.
The Palmdoc Chronicles would like to thank Andrew Schechtman MD for participating in this interview. If there are any other Medical PDA personalities you would be interested in us featuring on this site, please let me know.
Related post:
An Interview with Carl Weber MD
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About the author, Alan: Alan Teh is a Malaysian Physician who specialises in Hematology-Oncology & Stem cell Transplantation. He has been using Palm PDAs since 1997 and is absolutely reliant on them. His current PDA is a Palm Pre and is a strong advocate of the webOS platform, Palm's latest operating system. Caught the blogging bug in 2004 and has been addicted ever since… |
Love MeisterMed. I think I have every download they offer on my TX.
Wonderful work Dr.Schechtman has done with MeisterMed. I remember having PedBase beamed to my Handspring Visor as a resident and using it constantly. Med Depot has so many useful documents and references that are great excellent at point of care. For example, I heard a heart murmur in a newborn in our rural hospital and to help explain what I heard, I opened “Congenital Heart Defects” and showed the mother a diagram of the particular defect. It was priceless to see the understanding come across her face.
However, I apologize that I am not one of the docs submitting new work. I have very little knowledge of computer languages, writing applications, or programming. This is one of the reasons I like Palm OS, its ease of use. But if the step-by-step instructions are simple enough that might change. Thank you, MeisterMed and keep them coming.