- With Mayo Clinic obstetrician and medical editor-in-chief
Roger W. Harms, M.D.
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Roger W. Harms, M.D.
Roger W. Harms, M.D.
"Nothing helps people stay healthy more than the power of real knowledge about health." — Dr. Roger Harms
As medical editor-in-chief, Dr. Roger Harms is excited about the potential for MayoClinic.com to help educate people about their health and provide them the tools and information to live healthier lives.
The Auburn, Neb., native has been with Mayo Clinic since 1981 and is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology. Dr. Harms is a consultant and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and his specialty areas include office gynecology, high-risk obstetrics and obstetrical ultrasound.
From 2002 to 2007, Dr. Harms was director for education for Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Dr. Harms was the 1988 Mayo Medical School Teacher of the Year and served as associate dean for student affairs and academic affairs before taking this leadership role. He is the co-author of the "Mayo Clinic Model of Education." In 2008, Dr. Harms was presented the Distinguished Educator Award, Mayo Clinic, Rochester.
Dr. Harms is vice chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and medical editor of the Pregnancy section on this Web site. In addition, Dr. Harms is editor-in-chief of the "Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy" book, a month-by-month guide to everything a woman needs to know about having a baby.
"My medical education experience has grown out of a love of teaching, and that is what this site is about," Dr. Harms says. "If any visitor to this site makes a more informed and thus more comfortable decision about his or her health because of the information we provide, we are successful."
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Editor's blog
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March 3, 2009
Creating a new site for you
By Roger W. Harms, M.D.
Today's guest blogger is Matt Diamanti, director of user experience and design.
In the last blog post, Dr. Harms welcomed you and mentioned plans for our redesigned site. He also mentioned our core objective for this site: "Empower people to manage their health." For me, as our director of user experience and design, that means that every time you visit us you:
- Can trust us with your personal story
- Get what you need to clearly understand your current health situation
- Feel capable of completing your goals
- Know that you can depend on us again
To ensure that this happens, we designed the new site following a human-centered design (HCD) process. It had three phases:
Hear
We watched a sample of volunteers use our existing site, asked them questions about it, and experienced the successes and failures they encountered. In short, you told us to:
- Have all information about a topic in one easy-to-find location
- Provide more information about symptoms
- Be more transparent about the sources we researched for our information
- Create more multimedia
- Have a less cluttered and easier-to-use home page
- Provide a soothing and more updated look and feel
Create
We thought of new ideas for the site and created working models of them. Then we watched you use those models, and identified things that worked and things that didn't.
Deliver
Finally, we created a detailed blueprint of the new site and worked with our technical colleagues to produce and release it to you.
A few of the new features you'll soon experience:
- A new home page more focused on helping you easily find information
- Expansion of our "find it fast" method to symptoms, tests and procedures, and drugs and supplements
- New topic-specific guides where you can find all information about a topic in one place
- A new "Multimedia" viewer for browsing all images, interactive media, video and audio related to a topic
- An expandable reference section that details our sources
- A soothing and more updated visual design
We've created a slide show for you to get a sneak peek. Just click on the link below.
I hope you'll enjoy these new features, and once you've had a chance to experience them, I'd like to know - did we deliver? Do you trust us? Do you clearly understand your current health situation? Do you feel capable of completing your goals? Do you believe you can depend on us again?
I'd love to hear from you.
- Matt Diamanti
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