Servier Medical Art: Conversation with Olivier Gryson

Thursday, April 3, 2008

posted by Geetesh at 10:15 AM IST

Medical PowerPoint Olivier Gryson is the Internet Project Director at Servier International, an independent pharmaceutical company based in France. Their medical art is an offshoot of their existing business which they offer as free downloads for non-commercial use. In this exclusive conversation, Olivier discusses Servier's medical art and its evolution and usage.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the purpose and evolution of Servier Medical Art.

Olivier: The aim of Servier Medical Art is to provide healthcare professionals with a valuable tool to help them create their PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, when you want to illustrate a specific medical mode of action or an experiment in a lab, it is very difficult to find the image that exactly suits your needs.

Medical PowerPoint Our idea was to propose a construction set made of basic elements that can be combined each other to create more complex scenes. For example, to illustrate a pharmacological mode of action, you can combine an empty cell, with a nucleus, receptors, channels, and any other intracellular component by a simple “copy” and “paste”.

We launched Servier Medical Art at the occasion of the congress of the European Society of Cardiology in September 2005 in Stockholm. More than 30,000 cardiologists were attending the congress.

At this time, we were looking for an innovative service to animate our booth. It met a great success.

We then used Servier Medical Art during other international and national congresses or events in many countries worldwide. (Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Turkey, …)

Geetesh: What's unique and different about the Servier Medical Art collection. Can you share some trivia about their usage.

Olivier: First of all, our images are available as PowerPoint files. Using them only requires “copy” and “paste”. It was very important for us to propose a service that is easy to use. Indeed, most of our visitors do not have specific skill in computers.

Medical PowerPoint They are true vector images. We work with specialized scientific illustrators who produce Adobe Illustator files. Images are rescalable without loss of quality.

More than 2500 images are available for download. Furthermore, doctors can submit their suggestions online. We enrich our image bank almost every week.

Servier Medical Art is free of charge. Our objective is to be a source of reference for any healthcare professional who would like to illustrate a PowerPoint presentation. Basically, we precise on the site that images are available for educational purpose only, but we are often contacted by companies, universities or public organization who want to use our images in books or training programs. We often grant them the permission providing that they add Servier in the credits.

Recently we were amused to discover that our files were also spreading via peer-to-peer networks. We don’t think that it is the best way to get our image bank. Indeed, Servier Medical Art is in permanent evolution. Our site is the only up-to-date source to get the files. Furthermore, we do not ask for a specific registration to get the images. "You enjoy the images, you download them free of charge and that’s all!".

Note: This interview originally appeared on Indezine.com -- here's a link to the post...