by Günther Deuschl
The new website of the European Academy of Neurology is online! This is an important step for our Society to have this exciting tool for communication. It has taken some time since making the plans in 2014 but now most of the expectations are met.
What is new? First of all: the web domain. We have now ean.org as our common domain address for all our e-communication which makes it easier to find us. More importantly the presentation of all our content on the website is easier to access and to navigate and many new features are added. The website itself is now more user-friendly organised. The most important pages for the practicing neurologist are the guidelines. This part has in the foreground all EAN/EFNS/ENS guidelines for everybody. This is part of an overarching guideline programme of the EAN which will span in a few years all relevant neurologic diseases. The panels of the EAN are working hard to get this Hercules work underway. Furthermore when you enter as an EAN member you will find all existing guidelines from European Countries in the mother language in a few weeks from now. This is under the subheading research where you also can find the website for neurological rare diseases. This part is a resource to better diagnose patients with rare diseases and to interact with colleagues. The learn button also leads you to the educational resources like eBrain or all the teaching course activities of the EAN. Particularly the neurology updates keep you on track with new developments. This is the place where top-specialists from our panels post latest news from their field of interest.
This is also the first edition of the ‘EANpages’, the newsblog of EAN which was formerly called ‘Neuropenews’. EANpages also comes in a renovated format and is much easier to read. I would like to particularly focus your attention to the article of the month. This exhibits a careful selection by Christoph Diener of 3 to 8 articles from all high-ranking neurology journal issues of the past month which are briefly reported while one of them is selected as the article of the month by a larger group of EAN-experts. The other ‘must’ for a neurologist are the recommendations from the panels. They represent an expert selection of the top news selected by the panels with a brief description and a link. Besides this there is much valuable information which is presented in a very communicative wording reporting on topics of general interest; currently these are interviews with presidents from neighboring Societies, information about research in Denmark, the place for the 2nd EAN congress, the residents and research fellows section, preparations for the Copenhagen congress and many more.
Interaction is possible in many places on ean.org. The member area includes a social network platform. Within this platform you can create spaces with a group of colleagues, send messages, upload files or create polls. And you can stay on top of EAN messages available as well. Or follow us on twitter or facebook. And of course we welcome your comments on articles in EANpages.
With this step we have achieved an important goal of our strategic plan which was to establish a communicative platform where the neurologist updates himself on important developments which every neurologist in Europe should know and an easy to use access to education.
This is the time to thank a number of people without whom this would not have been achieved: the Web-Editor-in-chief Tim von Oertzen, the EANpages editor-in-chief Elena Moro, the newly formed editorial board, our staff at the Head Office and our software partner diva-e. They can be proud on their achievement for the EAN.