Abstract
Collaborative development involving both individuals and groups is often less efficient than independent development because of communication overhead and integration costs. Despite the decreased development efficiency, collaborations promise more general-purpose products because of the opportunity for integration, with negotiation and reconciliation of diverse perspectives. Collaborations are also perhaps less costly when considered in contexts where there is significant duplication of effort. Computer-facilitated collaboration can reduce the communication and integration burden such that the increased effort required to manage a successful collaboration focuses primarily on the development of shared conceptual model among the developers by requiring that the work product be independently reproducible. This reproducibility requirement incorporates formal quality assurance processes into the development process. In this paper, we describe our initial experiences developing SNOMED-RT using such a computer-facilitated collaborative process. We quantify the extra costs incurred to achieve consistency in our efforts and reproducibility of our results.
Full text
PDF
Images in this article
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Campbell K. E., Cohn S. P., Chute C. G., Rennels G., Shortliffe E. H. Gálapagos: computer-based support for evolution of a convergent medical terminology. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1996:269–273. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Humphreys B. L., Lindberg D. A., Schoolman H. M., Barnett G. O. The Unified Medical Language System: an informatics research collaboration. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1998 Jan-Feb;5(1):1–11. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1998.0050001. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Robinson D., Schulz E., Brown P., Price C. Updating the Read Codes: user-interactive maintenance of a dynamic clinical vocabulary. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1997 Nov-Dec;4(6):465–472. doi: 10.1136/jamia.1997.0040465. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Shortliffe E. H., Patel V. L., Cimino J. J., Barnett G. O., Greenes R. A. A study of collaboration among medical informatics research laboratories. Artif Intell Med. 1998 Feb;12(2):97–123. doi: 10.1016/s0933-3657(97)00045-6. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Spackman K. A., Campbell K. E., Côté R. A. SNOMED RT: a reference terminology for health care. Proc AMIA Annu Fall Symp. 1997:640–644. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]