C-O-E/Meme™
Medical Centers-of-Excellence Are Research, Clinical Trials, Intervention Leaders
However fine the “bricks and mortar”, however currently “high-tech” a facility’s medical infrastructure, and “well qualified” its staffing, however “superior” the administration, a medical institution’s excellence ultimately essentially depends on the special leadership of its medical experts, often referred to as their Medical or Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). These are the physicians and scientists from which their peers and the entire healthcare community seek guidance in medical science and practice, and who the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industry depend on for leadership. C-O-E/Meme™ is the MedMeme, LLC. database platform with methodology to evaluate and determine which medical institutions are the medical Centers-of-Excellence. The rankings are based on the comparative rankings of their KOL affiliates. KOL rankings are based on the indvidual’s entire body of work.
A collective volumetric score for an individual affiliate, based on a point system for points assigned to each category of 13 medical contribution and influence factors, is aggregated and normalized across all factors to produce a final, single impact score for an individual’s ranking of contribution and influence among their peers. The medical contribution factors are the following: (1) articles in ranked peer-reviewed journals; (2) books (as an editor or author); (3) book chapters (as editor or author); (4) patents held; (5) grants received; (6) clinical trial participation; (7) treatment guidelines developed; (8) medical conference presentations. The influence factors are: (9) medical society positions, (10) teaching positions, (11) editorial positions/publications, (12) editorial positions/meetings, and (13) editorial positions/societies. Among these ranking factors, there are weighted valuations within some ranking factors, such as which journals are more significant in medical/scientific terms, which meetings are more important, etc. Finally, the rankings of all the KOLs affiliated with any particular institution are aggregated to produce the ranking score for that institution to compare with the scores of all other ranked institutions.
The top ranked institutions are thus designated medical Centers of Excellence. Using these rankings can give perspectives on the institution’s functional role as a working base for conducting research and clinical trials, testing of treatment guidelines, as well as to position their KOLs in specific context of therapeutic activity involvement, expertise, and network relationships with other KOLs. Information within the C-O-E/Meme™ database provides otherwise unavailable perspectives for medical professionals and pharmaceutical/biotech industry individuals who want to know which institutions are the-best-of-the-best based on disease/treatment, or other criteria, and who are the individual physician affiliates that make them so.