A Nurses’ Email Discussion List, Delivered by Mail-List.com:

       A busy oncology nurse in Lewisville, Tx. got help determining protocols for DIEP flap monitoring to ensure successful recovery for a breast cancer patient, without taking hours out of her work schedule. She just sent an email to the group:

   “Does anyone have any protocols for DIEP flap monitoring? Thanks in advance!”

Help came within a few hours from a colleague half a continent away at UCLA Medical Center.

   “We do Q1 hour flap/temperature checks for the first 24 hours, then Q 2 hour for 24 and then Q 4 hour until discharge. We monitor for temperature differences (no>3 degrees between flap and control), color, etc. I hope this helps.”

An ICU nurse at WakeMed Health & Hospitals sent an email to the group, seeking other's experience in Covid visitation in ICU.

   “I am interested in finding out what other hospitals are doing for families of dying patients in COVID ICUs. Are they allowing families at the bedside in PPE? Do you limit the number and/or by relation? If so, are you willing to share your visitation policy? Thank you all in advance for your help.”

       In just minutes she got her answer from a colleugue at University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System nearly 1,000 miles away.

   “We encourage video visiting but allow one person to visit for one hour one time after appropriate screening (symptoms and temperature check: no visitor with symptoms allowed). We provide Ipads to assist in video chats ( facetime or duo) . . .”

Globally, nursing is one of the most demanding industries. Technologies are constantly updating and best practices evolving with them. Nurses need to stay connected to stay up to date. Reaching out to colleagues outside their own facilities also adds

For more than 30 years, members of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists have been using an electronic mailing list to tap the knowledge and experience of colleagues across the nation get answers to critical nursing questions.

broader experiences and vision to internal viewpoints and opinions so they don’t become myopic.
      In today’s age of the Internet, you might think these nurses are communicating in an online discussion group, a Facebook group or via Twitter feed. But for more than 30 years, members of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists (NACNS) have been using an electronic mailing list served up by Mail-list. com to tap the knowledge and experience of colleagues across the nation get answers to critical nursing questions. With over 1,700 members currently on the CNS mailing list, a single e-mail — sent from the convenience of a smart phone, tablet or work computer — can be seen and replied to by anyone among hundreds of members in as little as a few minutes.

       “Its purpose is to share clinical information. Our members are really very committed to it,” said Dr. Lisa Hopp. A professor of Nursing at Purdue University Calumet and director of the Indiana Center for Evidence Based Nursing Practice, Dr. Hopp is moderator of the CNS mailing list. “When members have a question about a policy they are developing or some new procedure, or a new piece of technology, they throw the question up on the list and if there are other members that are doing the same thing, they will get an answer within at the most usually hours.”

Staying on Top of Critical Issues

      In addition to connecting hundreds of clinical nurses to get questions answered and problems solved, Dr. Hopp said the email discussion group helps her as an educator of nurses. Monitoring discussions and debates on the list helps keep her and other list members abreast of hot topics and issues in the industry.

      “It feeds me professionally,” said Dr. Hopp. “I need to know what the issues are at the front line, such as what clinical nurses are making decisions about. I am not practicing in an organization as a CNS, so this gets me as close to it as I can be.”

      “We talk about clinical topics mostly, but we will also get into professional issues. Clinical specialists have a lot of professional issues and a lot of emerging national changes in terms of our regulation that people need to talk about. We’ll have some pretty hot conversations sometimes.”

      For hospitals and their patients, giving nurses fast, easy access to the experience and expertise of professionals with diverse backgrounds and specialties potentially reduces trial and error when implementing new technologies and can save time and money, ultimately resulting in better patient care and improved patient experiences.

Advantage of Email in the Social Media Age

      When the CNS mailing list got started in the mid 1990’s e-mail discussion groups were the height of technology for discussing topics amongst a far-ranging and geographically diverse population with shared interests. But in the last decade online forums and social media have become prominent in the group discussion arena while e-mail lists have been largely relegated to use as a means of distributing electronic newsletters and advertisements. So why continue to host discussions between clinical nurses via e-mail?
      For the nursing community as well as numerous other nonprofit and commercial communities, e-mail offers several advantages that facilitate their high-security workplace environments:

• Members can utilize work e-mail accounts to access discussions whereas many workplaces prohibit use of social media sites and discussion forums while on the job or while using company computers.


• Email is more accessible as messages can be sent or received via smart phone or tablet as wells as by computer and are more readable than many other platforms when using mobile devices.


• Many users are already logged into e-mail, avoiding the need to log-in to an additional website as forums and social media groups require.


• Members can opt to receive e-mail related to all topics or just the topics they’re interested in — no sorting through numerous discussions to find something interesting.


• Members can opt to receive all e-mail in real time or choose to receive daily or weekly digest e-mail that include the best of discussions as rated by other members


• Discussion e-mail arrive right in their e-mail inbox or smart phone so they don’t have to remember to log in and search through the latest discussions.


• Nurses in critical positions often get answers to their questions faster and with less hassle than they would by doing research or scouring online discussion groups.

Mail-list.com’s 100% Deliverability, Flexibility and Highly Responsive Service Yield Extraordinary Levels of Participation and Reliability

      With over 20% of the list’s 1,300 members contributing to discussions each month and an average of 23 messages posted each day, the CNS mailing list group boasts a highly unusual level of activity and participation. Considering the critical nature of many of the group’s discussions, getting those messages delivered reliably without bogging the system down or getting black-listed by Internet Service Providers is incredibly important.

   “Because members open and read the messages, ISP's rate Mail-List.com high in engagement, and deliver our emails to the inbox.” — Mark McCreary, Mail-list.com

      Dr. Hopp and her nationwide network of clinical nurses, Mail-list.com achieves a remarkable 100% delivery rate that is virtually unheard of among e-mail distribution services. Mail-list.com founder and developer Mark McCreary employs a three-fold strategy for ensuring the success of the firm’s discussion lists:

1. Nurturing a Positive Reputation Among ISP’s

   — Focusing exclusively on discussion groups and avoiding use of his servers for newsletter distribution or marketing campaigns, which are often interpreted as spam, Mail-list.com e-mail enjoy high responsiveness from recipients that generally puts the domain on the White List of most Internet Service providers.

2. Monitoring and Resending Rejected Messages

   — Rejected messages are automatically reformatted and resent from a different internet service provider (ISP). To increase deliverability, the reformatted message includes just a link to an online version of the message. Recipients can click through to view the message online and circumvent finicky spam filters.

3. Internal Inbox Monitoring System

   — Each discussion group includes several in-house e-mail addresses monitored by an automated system to ensure each message is being received. Messages that fail to reach the inboxes trigger an alert so the problem can be investigated and remedied.
   
         “Because members open and read the messages, ISP's rate Mail-List.com high in engagement, and deliver our emails to the inbox,”
   says McCreary.

An Affordable Package of Simplicity, Power & Support

When Dr. Hopp took over moderation of the list from a retiring predecessor in 2006, she found she also needed to find a new host for the list, which
had previously been hosted on a university’s private servers – a university Dr. Hopp had no personal connections with. Though she enjoys using the latest computer technology, Dr. Hopp had no experience moderating an e-mail discussion list. She sought out a service provider who could handle the massive quantity of e-mail fielded by the list’s members

without requiring too much time or technical know-how from herself, as moderator, or her members. After talking with Mark McCreary at Mail-list.com, Dr. Hopp realized she had found her solution.
      “I really had no experience with managing a list, so I needed to have a real simple approach and support,” said Dr. Hopp. “It was very obvious from my first conversation with Mark that I was going to get that from him. I can have some real knucklehead questions that I probably have had answered before and he is really patient with me.”

      She found that the Mail-list.com interface was easy to navigate and use, minimizing the time it takes her or a member to find what they’re looking for and interact with a discussion thread. On average, Dr. Hopp spends only a half-hour each week tending to the list. But even more importantly, the system was capable of handling all that her highly active group demands of it.

      “The interface that you as a moderator use and that the members use is dirt simple,” she said. “But behind that is all the power you need. That is sort of the ideal in technology.”

Affordable Solutions

      As a non-profit group, pricing was also an important consideration in the quest for a mail list host. With per-member pricing, rather than per 100 members or per 1000 members like other email lists, and special rates for non-profit agencies, Mail-list.com once again surpassed Dr. Hopp’s expectations.

      “We are always kind of living on a pretty tight budget,” Dr. Hopp said. “Mark offered a very reasonable price. It was something our organization could afford.”

Responsive and Pro-active Support

      But to meet customers’ high expectations, powerful platforms with easy-to-use interfaces and affordable pricing must be backed by support that responds quickly to customer needs. Dr. Hopp found that support from Mark McCreary and Mail-list.com not only responds to the needs of her and her group but often anticipates them ahead of time, adding features and capabilities that fit the way the CNS mailing list members use the service.

      “Mark continues to be highly responsive. He sort of watches from behind the scenes and keeps nudging and improving the technology to meet needs that we may not even know we have,” Dr. Hopp said. “He will tell me things that I am not aware of and say, ‘Hey, this is going on with the list, it looks like your users are moving in this direction, so I am adding this new capability to the list.”

      Mark has added several custom features to the CNS mailing list over the years. One of the most significant was a development that enabled the nurses to send attachments to each other without being flagged by hospitals’ security firewalls. Because of the high level of privacy and the critical nature of computerized information at hospitals, security protocols have to be tight. They often misidentify harmless e-mail attachments, like PDF files, as potential threats and prevent the e-mail from entering the hospital’s computer system.

      Mark’s solution was to program the list platform to remove attachments from members’ e-mail, post the attachment online and insert a link to the document before sending the e-mail on to

other members. The solution ensured delivery of those e-mail and made it easy for members who want to view an e-mailed document to do so easily. Since developing this work-around for the CNS group, Mark has also implemented the feature for other list groups with high security issues.

      Other custom features, like the option to receive weekly digests of popular discussions, enable members to be more selective about the messages they receive, avoiding the hassle of receiving irrelevant e-mail or becoming bogged down with e-mail at inconvenient times. Recently, Mark added the capability for members to “like” particular questions and responses and assign tags to conversations. These modifications allow members to be even more selective about what e-mail they read and receive so they can address topics they specialize in or follow issues they are concerned about.

      “Mark is a problem solver. I wish all of our IT folks could be like him — a really creative person who is always pushing the envelope to find a better solution to do what we need to do,” said Dr. Hopp. “Mark is somebody who really creates something and is looking ahead and anticipating the next issue, the next problem, the next better solution. That is what it seems like he is doing down there in Texas.”

Helping Non-profits Achieve More
                              — Through Email

      For busy clinical nurses doing critical work at hospitals across the nation, The CNS mailing list hosted and serviced by Mail-list. com has proven to be an effective, dependable means of sharing knowledge across a broad array of specialists, staying informed on important issues, and improving patient care and experience

as a result. But the NACNS isn’t the only organization that has found Mail-list.com e-mail discussion groups to be a convenient and efficient way to keep communication lines open. More than 500 non-profit and professional organizations, from the Children’s Environmental Health Network and the Sanford Consortium of Regenerative Medicine to the Global Hospitality Educators and MIDI Manufacturers Association, enlist Mail-list.com to keep members informed and connected.
     “At Mail-list.com, we’re proud to serve these excellent organizations and help them find solutions to their needs as communities,” said Mark McCreary. “KISS, Push and Mobile First Formatting are the keys to a vibrant online community.”

“KISS, Push and Mobile First Formatting are the keys to a vibrant online community.”
— Mark McCreary, Mail-list.com

      For more information about Mail-List.com and how an e-mail discussion group can keep your non-profit organization or other community connected with 100% deliverability and securityfriendly e-mail backed by pro-active support and a powerful framework, please visit:

www.Mail-List.com

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