Difference between revisions of "Grants/Soapnote"

Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.

There is a race on. Nearly every health organization in the United States is racing to adopt an electronic medical record-each with it's own standards. Unfortunately, each new proprietary system that is developed also locks away valuable tools that medical providers use in their day-to-day practice. An open forum for sharing of these tools, specifically clinical decision support and documentation templates is urgently needed.

Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).

Blog posts containing interactive clinical documentation templates and calculators produced on the site.

Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?

By empowering health care providers to share the clinical decision rules, documentation templates, checklists, and boilerplate, these tools will improve. As this tools improve, the delivery of healthcare for all will improve, as well.br />

What is your relationship with the community you are targeting? Why are you the best individual/organization to lead this project? Do you have prior experience in related projects?

I am a Family Medicine physician working for the Indian Health Service. I have been working on this issue on my own time since January 2009. I have previously worked as a computer programmer at the Centers for Disease Control prior to becoming a physician. I believe I am uniquely suited to create a resource that will improve healthcare delivery for all.

How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?

I have encouraged physicians at academic medical centers to test the use of the website. It could be compared against their current practice in controlled studies OR simple usability questionnaires such as the System Usability Scale (or other measure) could be employed. Objective usage statistics may include number of published posts, feedback, ratings, and comment counts.

How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?

For the development of the web site as a forum for exchange of information, I will be the sole developer. Regarding the development and exchange of shared content, I will solicit input from the wider primary care community via Twitter, Facebook, Delta Exchange (a web community of the American Association of Family Physicians), and doc2doc (a web community of the British Medical Journal). Collaborative features of the website will encourage their involvement and I hope the tools available on the website will recruit new users.

Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".

I feel very strongly that it is very important that clinical tools are not sequestered into proprietary systems. Ultimately, I know that the overall trend for scientific knowledge is toward openness. In this case, however, the government's very humanitarian goal of encouraging adoption of electronic medical records works against openness in some ways. The mad dash to obtain electronic efficiencies at the clinic level may have the effect of interfering with information exchange between providers. By providing an alternative such as the forum at www.soapnote.org, I believe the exchange of clinical documentation templates and calculators will be more open.

Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?

I do have some experience with computer programming (PHP, Python, Visual Basic, SQL Server), but I will try to keep this project as simple as possible by using Wordpress blogging software (open source) and available plugins. Where needed, I will employ some PHP code. Where coding or design is needed that is beyond my capability, I would like to use small contracts with professional programmers to accomplish necessary fixes and updates as they are needed.

What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?

I am certain that there are multiple challenges that I am not anticipating. First, I think there may be obstacles to contributors asserting any control of rights over the content they are authoring. Whereas many institutions encourage authors to have their works published, this seems to evaporate at the interface of formal publication vs. blog. By clarifying the issues surrounding this, a more favorable environment for information exchange will result. A second challenge will be simply encouraging adoption of the tools. Not all medical providers are technologically savvy, but these are the people who I want to recruit to use the web site to build the content for open use: clinical documentation templates and calculators. I will try to overcome this obstacle through discourse in online forums as well as by performing live demonstrations wherever I can and by posting video demos and tutorials to the web to ease the learning curve.

How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?

This project will not use advertising to produce revenue to continue the project. I will use two mechanisms to cover the costs of future development and web hosting. For the cost of future development, I will use the donation site www.chipin.com, or similar fundraising tools to help defray costs. For the cost of web hosting, my web hosting service, Dreamhost, has provided me with a link to request donations that will go directly to web hosting costs.

How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?

Any provider in any clinic on the planet who has unfettered access to the internet will also have free access to this web site and its content. As users contribute content, the site will become more valuable as a reference.

What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?

I would like to be able to clearly encourage users of the web site to employ Creative Commons licenses to the content they contribute to the site.

Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)

RSS feed, Email, Twitter, Facebook, and the web communities of several professional societies.

Legal

Yes