Doctors and other health professionals are increasingly engaged in projects that attempt to harness better management of information for the good of their patients. At the BMJ we know this because we are often sent papers that describe such efforts in the hope that we will publish them.
As editors we face a dilemma: these papers are not generally of high quality in a scientific sense, yet if we ignore them we miss the chance to reflect an important reality. In five years all hospitals, general practices, and new services like NHS Direct will have to collaborate to create a seamless electronic record.1 At the same time, the potential of the new technology to deliver information for teaching and learning is increasingly being harnessed. Such projects will be of varying quality. Some will succeed; some will fail. Disseminating the lessons learnt from these projects to a wider audience could probably prove useful.
Space is at a premium in the BMJ, and we will continue to give priority to studies that evaluate the benefits and risks of new developments in information for doctors and patients. But we see value in allowing the creators of less well evaluated initiatives a modest amount of space—400 words or so—to outline a project, describe the lessons learnt, and, importantly, provide a link to information on their own website for readers who wish to find out more. Ideally this website will provide detailed documentation of the project, a working demonstration, software to download, and email links to people with expertise.
When we are judging which of these submissions to publish we will evaluate the description of the project, the lessons, and the website by the conventional criteria of interest, importance, scientific quality, originality, and relevance to the general reader. The website will additionally be judged on its information design, so it should be in an evaluable state at the time of submission, and arrangements should be in place to ensure that the link is maintained for the foreseeable future. As with case reports in other aspects of medicine, we suspect that failure will provide more interesting lessons than will success, and we encourage contributors to share their failures with us.
We hope that, in time, the new section will encourage the development of web demonstrations of applications that will enable widespread evaluation of new information technologies and ease their adoption where appropriate.
Information in practice p 160
References
- 1.Burns F. Information for health: an information strategy for the modern NHS 1998-2005. A national strategy for local implementation. Leeds: NHS Executive; 1998. www.imt4nhs.exec.nhs.uk/strategy/index.htm [Google Scholar]