Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Every Patient is a research project with quicker perceiveable outcomes?

It may not be clear to the medical student/health professional 'users' on what exactly is their role in solving the queries posted by the patients/their social workers here http://care.udhc.co.in/INPUT/input_directory.jsp

Perhaps if we just think of this as an exercise in utilizing our health professional knowledge and training to 'help a patient' we may be able to build further toward understanding this process automatically?

We are looking for evidence based as well as innovative ideas that can go a long way to helping each and every individual patient. Perhaps we need to think of each and every patient as a 'mini' research project that has immediately palpable 'outcomes' in terms of positive responses in the patient's health arising from our inputs (in the form of evidence based innovative solutions for them)?

In every research project there is a problem statement (the research question). In the UDHC patient inputs we have their problem statements although deciphering them and spelling them out i e structuring them for global understanding is itself a major task and we are grateful to the few students in tabula-rasa who are helping us with it.

To these problem statements we need to offer our collective solutions using our and the internet's evidence based knowledge base to find the optimal solution for them based on our appreciation of the patient values. We are even more grateful to the students who point out where we are going wrong and how this may affect the patient values. :-)

This process of input-processing-outputs is not a single cycle driven process but needs multiple iterations for any given patient to reach a stable solution (even understanding a patient's values may require multiple input-process-output cycles). The best part of this process may be that all these multi-cognitive iterations and hypothesis testings get transparently recorded on a web platform that is beneficial to shared learning?

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