As chief of critical care at Boston Children's Hospital, Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH, was asked to consult on the case of a young girl who fell ill while vacationing with her family in Guatemala. He had treated a similar case in the U.S. before, but he encountered unexpected technological hurdles.
That spurred Burns -- working with many partners, including IBM -- to create OPENPediatrics.org, a platform that allows physicians to share skills and resources to treat sick children. Burns described his hopes for the site in a 2014 article in Medtech Boston:
Our goal was to create something called a community of practice where instead of being broad and thin like a MOOC (Massive Open Online Classes), we would be narrow and much more deep, and the content would actually be peer reviewed by doctors and nurses who care for critically ill children, because those are essentially our primary users," Burns says.
The site, which launched last year, offers forums for health-care workers worldwide to share experiences and a multimedia library with videos and animations -- including some interactive features -- on everything from nasopharyngeal suctioning to Faciltating Parent Presence During Invasive Procedures.
Burns and his team have been thinking how to leverage the platform to support research.
(A confession: I learned about OPENPediatrics through an article in Wesleyan magazine. Stanford's Cardinal brethren on the East Coast, Wes, like Stanford fosters interdisciplinary projects and, I'm proud to say, is the alma mater of two of us in the medical school's relatively small Office of Communication.)
Previously: Stanford undergrad works to redistribute unused medications and reduce health-care costs, Stanford Medicine X: From an "annual meeting to a global movement" and Euan Ashley discusses harnessing big data to drive innovation for a healthier world
Photo by Intel Free Press
