Silverchair Science+Communications

Silverchair Science+Communications is a technology and publishing services firm that develops networked information resources for owners of medical content. These online resources allow content owners to deliver their existing and new content to institutions and individuals in various digital media formats.

Silverchair’s product development and implementation process includes:

• Extensive research of business needs, content assets, and market forces
• Configuring appropriate technology solutions
• Comprehensive content management and maintenance
• Ongoing usage analysis and resulting application enhancement
• Marketing consultation and tools to maximize market penetration and profitability

History

Silverchair was founded in 1993 by Thane Kerner and Elizabeth Willingham, who continue to serve as CEO and Executive Vice President, respectively. The firm began as a provider of editorial and production services to medical publishers, including Butterworth-Heinemann, an imprint of Elsevier, and the medical division of Little, Brown and Company (now a division of Wolters Kluwer). As the publishing market has evolved, Silverchair has grown with its clients to focus on delivering content in the digital media arena, especially in the area of semantic publishing. Silverchair launched its first website, a resource for clinical neurologists, in 1998.

In 2002, Silverchair launched Silverchair Learning Systems, an eLearning technology provider that focuses on the staff training needs of senior care facilities.

Technology

Silverchair’s technology platforms include:

• Silverchair Content Manager, an XML-powered standardized development platform that is the basis for all website development.
• Silverchair Orbital, a web-based authoring platform that allows for online, XML-based authoring and enforces a structured editorial workflow that handles all aspects of content creation, revision, and posting.
• TOTEM (Tagger’s Online Thesaurus and Editorial Manager), a taxonomy-management tool used during Silverchair’s semantic tagging process. TOTEM is a relational database that contains an actively managed biomedical taxonomy tuned specifically for use by web-based information systems.

Online Information Products

Silverchair has developed the following online information resources for medical content clients:

• The McGraw-Hill Professional family of websites: AccessMedicine, AccessEmergency Medicine, AccessSurgery, AccessPharmacy, AccessScience, and Harrison's Online en Español
• American Psychiatric Publishing’s (APPI) Psychiatry Online
• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) websites: PSNet: Patient Safety Network and Web M&M: Morbidity & Mortality Rounds on the Web
• American Academy of Pediatrics' (AAP) Patient Education Online, Pediatric Practice Management, and Pediatric Coding Newsletter Online
• Ardor Scribendi’s Derm101.com

Clients

Silverchair partners with leading medical information providers in several sectors:

• Commercial medical publishers (e.g., McGraw-Hill, Wolters Kluwer)
• Medical societies (e.g., American Academy of Pediatrics, New England Journal of Medicine)
• Government agencies (e.g., Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), National Cancer Institute (NCI))
• Academic medical centers (e.g., University of California at San Francisco, University of Virginia)