Using Web-Based Tools to Stay Current

“Keep­ing up with the lit­er­a­ture” is a con­stant, often chal­leng­ing activ­ity for those of us com­mit­ted to evidence-based prac­tice — that notion that cur­rent valid evi­dence must sup­port clin­i­cal deci­sions. This poster abstract, pre­sented at the AABB 2009 con­fer­ence, offers one solution.

For the past two years, I’ve been con­duct­ing work­shops explor­ing how web-based tools can sup­port research and teach­ing activ­i­ties in trans­fu­sion sci­ence. In each ses­sion, I asked par­tic­i­pants to con­tribute cus­tom PubMed search queries, which were nego­ti­ated and refined until they cap­tured the inter­ests of the whole group. These queries were con­verted into RSS feeds, com­piled into a read­ing list and pub­lished online. You can view all these feeds in the Trans­fu­sion Read­ing List, which is peri­od­i­cally updated with new feeds. This way, any­one out­side the work­shop is able to down­load and mod­ify the feeds to meet their own learn­ing needs, and resub­mit them to the List if they wish.

This poster explains the learn­ing the­ory behind why this works so well if you want to stay up to date. No one per­son can gen­er­ate all the analy­sis, debate, con­text and inter­pre­ta­tion needed to cre­ate use­ful evi­dence. The inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and col­lab­o­ra­tive nature of trans­fu­sion med­i­cine makes the task of find­ing rel­e­vant knowl­edge espe­cially daunt­ing. Engage­ment is the crit­i­cal point where com­mu­nity and indi­vid­ual infor­ma­tion needs inter­sect. A col­lab­o­ra­tive trans­fu­sion read­ing list offers a sim­ple struc­ture and process that sup­ports mem­bers’ engage­ment with infor­ma­tion and each other.

Down­load: Using Web-Based Tools to Stay Cur­rent With the Lit­er­a­ture poster (pdf)
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