Samir Gupta, MD, discusses his team's wiki-based asthma management plan in a new Pulmonary Reviews audiocast.
A wiki website (that is, a collaborative site on which any user can add and edit content) has resulted in a new and improved set of asthma management instructions, Samir Gupta, MD, of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and the University of Toronto, told Pulmonary Reviews.
Gupta and colleagues designed a wiki to allow stakeholders to work together on a new asthma action plan (AAP)—a single page of instructions to help patients manage their asthma symptoms. The wiki allowed visitors to build and make visual and content changes to a generic AAP, intended as a template that primary care physicians could tailor to individual patients’ needs. Three separate groups—each of which included pulmonologists, primary care physicians, asthma educators, and patients with asthma—used the wiki to create its own AAP over a one-week period.
On average, each participant used the wiki for 23 minutes and made 7.7 changes to the AAP during the week, with patients tending to make the most changes. Eighty percent of participants were satisfied with the final AAP, and only 9% said they perceived group hierarchies during the development process. The three resulting AAPs were all very similar, and the researchers combined them into a final AAP.
Gupta and colleagues described the wiki process in the Journal of Medical Internet Research last year, and a new paper about the advantages of the final AAP, compared with existing AAPs, is in press. “We’re now testing it in a true primary care environment to see if we can indeed get physicians and patients to use it more readily and improve how often patients are getting this tool and how their asthma is ultimately controlled,” Gupta said.
To listen to our audio interview with Samir Gupta, MD, click here!
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