Problem:
There is no shortage of information on the web for healthcare providers but how do you know what is good? Depend on Dr Google, who might know what’s best in the world, but knows nothing about your community and context?
Background:
Clinical training now focuses on healthcare delivered in teams. Workshops have impact in the short term but effects are forgotten without repeated reminders, or commitment-to-change strategies. Critical challenges, such as opioid overdose, are seen too infrequently in some communities to keep a team fully skilled. This low frequency makes outcomes hard to measure. Few systems assess their impact on clinical practice, beyond user satisfaction. Less dramatic, but still important, changes in guidelines take years to become common practice because of infrequent opportunities to use them.
Solution:
A Yelp-like recommender system to help you find what’s best for your situation, based on ratings and choices of your peers: other health care providers (HCPs). Just like Yelp can help you find a decent local restaurant, with choices honed by your preferences and context, a recommender system can help winnow the wheat from the chaff in CPGs, clinical pathways and other decision support tools.
Features:
- Simple flexible search
- Tag your favorites
- Simple shared rankings
- Shared highlighting of key factoids (like Kindle reader)
- Quick easy capture of new resources, using stratified sampling
- Curated, collated recommendations
- Tracking which resource segments most used
- Team-based resource sharing & learning
- Staged follow up reminders (like Rosetta Stone™)
- Integration with CPD-credits systems such as MainPro+
Approach:
An app but not an app. Mobile-accessible web-service, without the development costs and limitations of an app. Rather than try reproduce the old one-size-fits-all web portal, this provides a personal touch, which learns your preferences. Alberta already provides a wide range of TOP class resources but busy HCPs don’t have time to find them. Tap into these existing SCNs, CPGs, and pathways, using recommendations from your buddies.
Rather than have the platform do everything, integrate it with existing systems such as Moodle, OLab, Entrada, Desire2Learn and Destiny as callable micro-services.
Sidestream advantages:
We can tap into existing resources such as CURIOS, PLP datasets, Clinisnips videos. Stratified sampling survey system can also be used to capture point-of-learning rapid feedback on CME courses, rural videoconference sessions, conference workshops and seminars
Outcome measures:
Our group has leading expertise on the tracking of real actions using xAPI activity metrics (http://openlabyrinth.ca/using-experience-api-xapi-on-openlabyrinth). We can assess how people really tackle a given problem, not simply how they answer a quiz. Because we can schedule when these follow-up virtual scenarios arise in their regular workflows, we can employ an optimized reminder timeline for each of our participating teams. (http://openlabyrinth.ca/virtual-scenarios-and-spaced-repetition/ )
Performance metrics, captured both during training and in post-workshop clinical practice, can be combined with health service metrics from Alberta Health and PLP (www.albertaplp.ca) so that short and long term effects and health outcomes can be measured.