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February 20, 2008

Design Review Discussion

Our Team had our Design Review on Feb. 15 and we were able to gain a tremendous amount of perspectives and ideas from the members present. Our main question we needed answered is what is an incentive model we can create to attract physicians to add content to the site. Through our initial interviews with various physicians, we learned that doctors are very busy and most likely will not have the time to post material on the web. Doctors that do publish materials usually do it to gain recognition in peer-review groups or through journals. It would be tough for our site to offer similar incentives or recognition.

At our Design Review, we first discussed the main challenges we see with creating Casepedia. They included Credibility, Reliability, Incentives for users to contribute, and Ethics.

Next, we discussed 4 possible directions to take the site to overcome these challenges:

1. Publishing without Publishing
We discussed methods of creating incentives for physicians to publish online with out having to go through the long requirements needed to publish in a journal. Publishing in a journal requires an extensive approval, literature review, and peer review before a final publication can be made. Therefore, we are looking for a way to maintain the legitimacy of a journal without all the background work.

2. Adverse Drug Reactions
We would focus primarily on creating a database that complied information on different medications causing adverse reactions for patients. These could be listed by either the provider side or patient side. We will be examining the current system used by the FDA or physicians to keep track of these events.

3. Patient Contributed Cases
Instead of looking for physicians to contribute the clinical cases, we would create a database that was comprised of cases by patients. When we conducted our Competitive Analysis, we learned that a majority of comments on cases were coming from patients. There for we would overcome the challenge of physicians' incentives.

4. Grand Rounds Platform
Grand Rounds are forums where physicians come together to discuss their recent cases. These can be either public or private. Physicians present in Grand Rounds using various multimedia. So our site would videotape the Grand Rounds and also upload all other multimedia from the grand round. They physician or institution would be able to pick how private/public they wanted to make their information.

Posted by shahas at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)