Faculty Collaboration Database

Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2012;19(4):621-5

Date

12/06/2011

Pubmed ID

22140210

Pubmed Central ID

PMC3384103

DOI

10.1136/amiajnl-2011-000391

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-84865155028 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   15 Citations

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To describe the creation and evaluate the use of a wiki by medical residents, and to determine if a wiki would be a useful tool for improving the experience, efficiency, and education of housestaff.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: In 2008, a team of medical residents built a wiki containing institutional knowledge and reference information using Microsoft SharePoint. We tracked visit data for 3 years, and performed an audit of page views and updates in the second year. We evaluated the attitudes of medical residents toward the wiki using a survey.

RESULTS: Users accessed the wiki 23,218, 35,094, and 40,545 times in each of three successive academic years from 2008 to 2011. In the year two audit, 85 users made a total of 1082 updates to 176 pages and of these, 91 were new page creations by 17 users. Forty-eight percent of residents edited a page. All housestaff felt the wiki improved their ability to complete tasks, and 90%, 89%, and 57% reported that the wiki improved their experience, efficiency, and education, respectively, when surveyed in academic year 2009-2010.

DISCUSSION: A wiki is a useful and popular tool for organizing administrative and educational content for residents. Housestaff felt strongly that the wiki improved their workflow, but a smaller educational impact was observed. Nearly half of the housestaff edited the wiki, suggesting broad buy-in among the residents.

CONCLUSION: A wiki is a feasible and useful tool for improving information retrieval for house officers.

Author List

Crotty BH, Mostaghimi A, Reynolds EE

Author

Bradley H. Crotty MD Associate Professor in the Medicine department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Attitude of Health Personnel
Boston
Computer Communication Networks
Educational Technology
Hospital Information Systems
Humans
Information Dissemination
Information Management
Information Storage and Retrieval
Internal Medicine
Internship and Residency
Program Evaluation
User-Computer Interface