Themes (%) Clinical question: specific case Announcement
Clinical question: general Protocol/practice guidelines Product/equipment Question: Nonclinical Coding/billing IR Residency Error
Survey
Business development Board question/MOC Case report
Medical school
Most thread themes were clinical questions (48.2 percent), representing either a specific case (33.7 percent) or general clinical question (14.5 percent). Of these clinical questions, the predominant topics related to vascular procedures (27.7 percent), followed by oncologic (8.0 percent), hepatobiliary (6.4 percent) and gynecologic (4.7 percent) subjects. Most response posts represented one of three categories: anecdotal (38.9 percent), general (20.4 percent) and advice (15.4 percent). Of note, medical literature was referenced in only 4.8 percent of all response posts. Interestingly, members were as likely to contribute responses across a variety of infrequent themes and subjects as they were to more common ones.
In addition, we investigated the relationship between threads and responses on the basis of the original post’s day of the week and time of day. Of the 827 new threads, most were posted on Wednesdays (18.4 percent), closely followed by Tuesdays (17.5 percent). Most thread responses were subsequently posted on Thursdays (18.1 percent), indicating that members can obtain a significant response rate to their question within 24–48 hours of their initial post. Furthermore, we also noted that most responses (42.9 percent) were posted between 7–11 a.m., suggesting that member activity in the forum occurs predominantly on weekday mornings.
It is important to acknowledge that the number and timing of posts may
33.7 15.8 14.5 8.8 6.3 4.8 4.5 3.3 3.1 1.9 1.7
0.8 0.5 0.1
Table 1. Consensus categories for the empirically derived taxonomy
not fully reflect how the SIR Connect Forum is used. Many “silent” members log into the forum to view posts without contributing their own responses. As such, it is possible that member activity may fluctuate beyond the number and timing of posts. Furthermore, thread contributions among members vary greatly, with a subset of “super contributors” who initiate many new conversations and respond to existing posts. Consequently, the popularity of certain topics on the forum may be somewhat skewed toward subject matter that these members find interesting.
Conclusion The SIR Connect Open Forum is a tremendous open-source IR knowledge base that facilitates the transfer of knowledge and experience among society members. Our analysis represents a first attempt at understanding the content and use of shared information among SIR members. The information generated from this qualitative analysis could be further used to create a layer of metadata about each post, enabling future analysis and enhancing search capabilities to help SIR members directly seek specific topics of interest.
Considerations for future enhancements to the forum should include a voting system, used in many social media platforms, to help increase visibility and interest in specific topics. This will allow users to quickly identify topics of interest among the daily thread posts that they may choose to read. For
clinical questions, an “up-voting” feature would also be beneficial in recognizing the response posts that are considered the consensus best answer to a particular question. Finally, generating a point system for contributors and their posts will help members discern the “super contributors” who likely post high-quality thread topics and resources.
These modifications will not only help members share information but will also help to organize forum content and facilitate the user experience.
More online
See the online version at
bit.ly/2FjlmVu for sidebars on the most discussed SIR Connect posts and top Open Forum contributors.
References
1. Sedory, S. Welcome to SIR Connect! [Forum Post] Feb. 12, 2015: Available from:
connect.sirweb. org/communities/community-home/viewthre ad?GroupId=547&MID=22&CommunityKey=0c 6966c7-7366-441e-9eeb-4f5619f68b1e&tab=di gestviewer&ReturnUrl= percent2fcommunities percent2fcommunity-home percent2fdigestviewer percent3fcommunitykey percent3d0c6966c7- 7366-441e-9eeb-4f5619f68b1e percent26tab percent3ddigestviewer.
2. Treude, C. and M.-A. Storey. Effective communication of software development knowledge through community portals, in Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSOFT symposium and the 13th European Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering 2011, ACM: Szeged, Hungary. p. 91–101.
3. Wright, A., et al. Clinical decision support alert malfunctions: Analysis and empirically derived taxonomy. J Am Med Inform Assoc, 2018. 25(5): p. 496–506.
sirweb.org/irq | 35
Response types (%) Anecdote General Advice
Addendum Reference Error
Technical Tangent
Disagreement
38.9 20.4 15.4 9.7 4.8 0.9 0.9 0.5 0.4
Topics (%) General Vascular Oncology
Hepatobiliary Medications Gynecology Urology
Gastrointestinal Venous access Neurology
Orthopedics Dialysis
34.3 27.7 8.0 6.4 5.0 4.7 4.1
2.8 2.5 1.8 1.7 1.0
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
