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Using Wikis in Hospitals?

Posted by Cliff on from the easily-sharing-medical-information dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "A friend who is a medical doctor in a hospital in Europe is interested in promoting wikis for sharing medical research notes in his community. Does anyone have experience with how to approach this? Most of the targeted users will not be particularly computer, or Internet, literate. I've used wikis in several software companies but never in a medical environment. What would be the best way to overcome resistance? How should my friend present it so that it makes sense to them?"

3 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah great, I would love to see this... by tod_miller · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Serious:
    Before you consider wiki, describe what you need? a loosly organised fast changing refinement of data? highly structured secure and minimally changing data? something for what? wiki isn't a good for all solution.

    Some wikis support some cool features like templating, but if you are serious about an extensible, knowledge management solution that works on PC's, Mac's, TV's, Mobile phones, PDA's etc, then reply here and I will get in touch with some suggestions.

    Joking:
    You are just about to go under, and the youthful looking doctor fires up wikipedia.org and starts searching for 'brown wobbly bits' and 'blood'... just hope it hasn't been /. tolled with goatse links, else you will come out of your appendectomy with an asshole you could use to carry bowling balls around.

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  2. Seed it by linuxwrangler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The trouble with all Wikis is the startup. When there is no info on it the Wiki is useless and it is hard to get people interested in it or even to give people an idea of what it is. Users only embrace them once they have become a valuable source of information.

    Before ever showing it to anyone it needs to be seeded with an initial structure and as much useful info as you can find time to enter.

    Of course you will have to be sure that the intended use doesn't run afoul of HIPPA. The very nature of a Wiki will give a HIPPA compliance officer night-sweats. How do you intend to ensure that no confidential data is entered and that if it is it is only viewable by authorized people?

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    "You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
  3. Sounds more like a research issue than hospital by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It sounds to me more like you want a general research exchange vehicle than something that would actually be used in the operation of a hospital.

    Wikis have to be tweaked a bit to make good *academic* research exchange systems. I emphasize "academic" because in other areas they work fine as installed, but the academic area often focuses a lot on attribution and authorship, and those bastards won't publish to wiki where other people can change it, and will fight over whether someone's edits justified their position in the author list -- I have seen grad students cry and confess to me they were contemplating suicide over 2d versus 3d position in the author list. Most academic researchers should be shot as an eugenics measure for the mental health of the species.

    Anyway, given that we aren't going to that far, I think you want to model something after the old Royal Society type circulars. In the old days formal and informal clubs of scientists and interested patrons and amateurs would write letters to a secretary, who would gather them and possibly do some filtering and editting and print and forward the collection to everyone. It enabled people interested in a esoteric topic and spread accross oceans and continents to stay plugged in to their community of interest.

    Start by examining http://arxiv.org/. It keeps track of drafts and revisions, and maintains authorship for the neurotic academics, and has been very successful.

    Then, I would model something along the lines of a n email list to which people would submit their research, with a periodic digest and review similer to the summary of the linux kernel summary at http://www.kernel-traffic.org/.

    The medical profession already has similar specialized reports. For example, doctors report strange new diseases and conditions and peculiar deaths to the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta, which then produces a weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report, indentifying any new trends or outbreaks. It was in such a report that the reports of several doctors that they had seen gay men with weakened immune systems was first announced, giving rise to the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), now mostly known by the Reaganites (who didn't want to admitt that gays existed) more politically correct acronym, AIDS.

    A group editted kernel-traffic style digest of a higher traffic email list would be my direction.