Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
thing as there is no control mechanism or governance process for checks and
balances. Nevertheless, blogs are helping people to refi ne and adapt their
cognitive model on various activities by observation and by making people
aware of credible resources and consequently becoming the most effi cient and
widely adopted tool for social computing.
Allowing the participants of a clinical trial to blog among themselves to
share information about how a new treatment works for them and what kind
of side effects they experience may be a very effective and effi cient means to
collect the data in near-real time. The categorized blogs can be used for clinical
trials: blogs used internally among the trial participants and sponsors; blogs
open to the general public; blogs focused on a particular event; blogs used
exclusively among trial sponsors; and blogs used by an individual.
Blogs can be offered as an ad hoc channel for trial participants to publish
and be listened to only by those that care to subscribe to a specifi c topic or
clinical trials of a treatment in this case. The trial sponsors and researchers can
monitor how their trial participants share information, communicate, and col-
laborate. For example, blogs can be used for sharing laboratory notes, peer
review commentary, and analysis of test cases for clinical trials.
18.6
VIRTUAL WORKPLACE
A virtual workplace can be used as a controlled and managed blog to enable
multidisciplinary collaboration for effective and effi cient clinical trials with a
large group of participants in various geographies.
A virtual workplace is adaptable to many scientifi c disciplines and environ-
ments for collaboration over the network, obviating the need for face-to-face
meetings requiring not only the extensive travel time that elongates the dura-
tion of the study but also the travel expenses that increase the cost of the study.
The requirements for a virtual workplace to support all activities relevant
to a scientifi c research and development project, including clinical trials, can
be summarized as:
• Real - time collaboration across scientifi c disciplines and institutional
boundaries
• Knowledge
sharing
across
scientifi c disciplines and institutional
boundaries
• Intellectual
property
and
rights
management
across
institutional
boundaries
• Workforce management through semantic search for locating resources
based on expertise, projects, focus areas, organizations, geographical loca-
tions, and so on
• Integrated activity management to manage the end - to - end research and
development process from raw data collection to knowledge discovery
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