Launched on August 25, 2017, MyVHL offers to users registered with login and password, including login through Facebook and Google, the following personalized services, all free of charge: creation of collections of selected VHL documents, definition of topics of interest in order to receive related documents, VHL search history, list of favorite links and list of user publications.
In its nine months of functioning, MyVHL has over 20,000 registered users, of which over 13,000 are active on the platform. In the last trimester, around 2 thousand users have used MyVHL services monthly. Of active users, 76% are female, and of these 60% have an academic degree of Bachelor, 20% of Specialization, 7% of Master and 2% of Doctorate. The professional profile of the feminine public is distributed in 26% in the field of Nursery, 13% in Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy, 12% in Medicine, 10% in Odontology, 7% in Nutrition, 6% in Psychology and 3% in Pharmacy. Among the male public, 57% have an academic degree of Bachelor, 20% of Specialization, 8% of Master and 3% of Doctorate. The male public is distributed in the following fields: 26% in Medicine, 14% in Nursery, 11% in Odontology, 10% in Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy, 5% in Physical Education, 4% in Psychology and 3% in Pharmacy.
In the last four months, new information services have been added to MyVHL:
- Weekly e-mail alerts about new VHL documents related to the topics of interest registered by users;
- RSS registration, which enables the integration of RSS signatures from news websites or from VHL search results, facilitating access to updated content from these information sources automatically through MyVHL; and
- Sharing of document collections through public URL to any person or group of people via e-mail, Whatsapp or social networks.
With the weekly alerts, users may receive e-mails listing VHL documents that are related to the key words chosen when creating the topics of interest. The adoption of the RSS format, available in many websites, including the VHL search interface, allows users to register the RSS of a search result and automatically receive the new documents that will later integrate the databases. The sharing of document collections has many uses, for example to attend the need of a teacher to share documents that are required reading for the following class.
From August 2017 until April 2018, over 13,000 active MyVHL users generated approximately 315,000 visited pages. Of all possible actions in the personalized services, 29% are related to favorite documents, 20% to search combinations from VHL search history, 12% to moving of selected documents from created collections, 7% to related documents and 2% to topics of interest.
Comparing the period of January to April 2018 to the period of September to December 2017, there was an increase of 10% in the number of users, 6% in the number of visits and 8% in the number of pages visited.
According to Renato Murasaki, Manager of Methodology and Information Technology, “the new services that are being offered by MyVHL respond to users’ suggestions after the launching, as the product was presented in events and meetings both with our counterparts and also PAHO/WHO Representations in each country we visited. BIRME/PAHO/WHO continues to monitor de use of the personalized services and to develop and continually improve MyVHL, with the launch for an application for smartphones iOS and Android forecasted for the second semester of 2018”.