Saturday, April 27, 2013

Medical Student Caregiver workflow

As medical student caregivers (see this definition of a medical student: student.bmj.com/student/view-article.html?id=sbmj030241) we discuss and learn from patient cases and practice what is also labeled as 'patient centered learning' and along with this we try to get students (ourselves) to write case-study based qualitative research papers based on our 'patient-centered learning' experiences. We also communicate on emails as there are many emailing online users who may not have the time or inclination to be on all forums. As medical students you can contribute to nurturing  this learning ecosystem by starting to share your cases (patient experiences after obtaining and uploading their informed consent) to our website http://care.udhc.co.in and then discussing them on our online forum of 600+ users. Don't be intimidated by the fact that you may not have been trained to handle cases in college. All you need to evaluate cases is just common sense and if you have good knowledge of anatomy it becomes an added bonus. Everything else can be learned through further online mentoring. Will be looking forward to your inputs and don't hesitate to clarify your doubts either through messaging or preferably through crowd-sourcing them in our online forum. 

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Two separate workflows for user interactions?

Two separate workflows to register/allow 'Independent-care-seekers' and 'Caregivers for dependents?'

Independent-Care-seekers would be mostly urban computer users posting their own cases who can register emulating the healthboard pattern of one click registration. http://www.healthboards.com/

Just take a look at how they get 'users' to register for their site:http://www.healthboards.com/boards/register.php

While many of their rules http://www.healthboards.com/boards/faq.php?faq=faq_hb do not apply to our workflow we can emulate their skeleton that works around the problem (of signed-patient-consent-form or one-click-disclaimer dilemma) we are facing now.

Caregivers for dependents (comprising of our Mathabhanga social workers or patient relatives or even medical students and health professionals reporting their cases) will need to go with the current workflow and will not be allowed to post without the uploaded consent form. This workflow is actually borrowed from and currently active in the BMJ Case Reports journal as all the case reports are made by similar caregivers (mostly health-professionals) who have to upload their signed patient consent forms for their case reports to be peer-reviewed.

As currently much of our activity on http://care.udhc.co.in/ is through 'Caregivers for dependents' i guess we would have to make do with the current-workflow (which is mostly based on the BMJ model) but one can think of creating a separate window in the website for the 'Independent urban care-seeker' (Healthboard model) who can get in without the consent form bottle neck with a one-click disclaimer?