Carl Robert Blesius*, Harvard Medical School and Lab of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, United States Avni Khatri*, Lab of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, United States Michael Richard Steigman*, Lab of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, United States Henry C Chueh, Harvard Medical School and Lab of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: C-Rotunda Room Date: 2012-09-16 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM Last modified: 2012-09-10

If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL).

Medicine has evolved to become one of the most collaborative and complex occupations. The intricacies of patient care make multi-disciplinary team-based collaboration and communication paramount to the delivery of safe and high-quality care. Communication within and across teams, however, is becoming more difficult and fragmented as care is distributed among providers to meet current demands. In addition, providers are confronted with communication pitfalls related to team-based gathering, storing, and retrieving of patient information. Technology provides healthcare teams with unprecedented access to vast amounts of medical information. With the right tools, it can also provide the needed assistance in dealing with this information by potentiating the teamwork required to avoid the pitfalls.

We describe ongoing attempts to support this type of collaborative work in medicine using open source Web application frameworks focused on community building. This has resulted in a Web-based system with more than 17,000 registered staff members within the Partners Healthcare System. It now serves as a “living laboratory” for exploring different combinations of social networking/groupware applications such as user profiles, group discussion forums, wikis, blogs, group calendars, and file shares. We highlight applications we have created, collaborative activities we have supported, and recurring challenges we have faced over six years of cultivating online communities within our large academic medical network.