ViewMyVric
One more Welcome
Hello. It’s been a while since we blog, so to start well, Happy 2o12 and all the best all throughout the year and all future years!
Starting on a very good note, we are commencing ViewMyVRIC thanks to the support of JISC through their Virtual Research Environment programme. We are glad to say that all is in place for us to start and we will regularly be posting the progress of the project. In broad terms, our aims are:
1. To develop an alternate access to VRIC where users interact with the data manipulation features of the environment.
2. To develop and make available easy-to-use visualisation tools for doctors and healthcare professionals. These are not the traditional research clinicians based at clinical research centres; as is the case for current VRIC users.
3. Allow non-research medics and health care professionals to export data files from within VRIC in different standard formats to be used in presentations, conferences, journal articles, or reports, or for further analysis in statistical software.
4. To allow the visualisation tools within VRIC to be used for the analysis of user behaviour within the VRE.
We will keep you posted with detailed information on each of the aims and more information regarding the project.
Latest news
After a successful project evalualtion, we are now concentrating our efforts in the dissemination of VRIC.
Writing, writing!
Reporting on VRIC
Very exciting times lay ahead as we approach the closure of the project. We are working hard these days in writing up the lessons learned from the work conducted in the past year, as well as documenting the software applications that have been the result of a truly enriching learning experience.
We are looking forward to find ways to continue this work and engage new communities in a highly valuable VRE.
Next visit to RNOH all set
The team will be visiting the RNOH to follow-up the changes made to VRIC after implementing end-user requirements. The visit is to take place on the 1st of September and we are looking forward to getting feedback on the new features of VRIC and the development work of the past weeks.
Recent developments
We have had two very busy weeks in which several features and bugs of the system have been completed and fixed -including the ever-so-random behaviour of IE. The goal for next week is to complete a full migration tool which will allow us to continue the development of the trial XML structure whilst simultaneously running a production server. Reaching that goal will be followed by a major release of the completed features, so wait for great news.
On a separate note, we would like to welcome new co-designers who have joined us this week to work their trials in VRIC.
Finally, we explored a service called TrialX (http://trialx.co.uk/) which offers interesting services to researchers and patients in the difficult task of linking trials with potential participants. We concluded that it could be a good addition to our system if the company released their iPhone app for the iPad in the UK -currently only available in the USA.
till later
: ]
VRIC in the iPad
We have successfully tried the VRIC website on the iPad. The system section where assessment of a patient is captured on forms has the potential to be quite useful during clinics as data is entered by tapping the screen and selecting options from the forms which can take place while specialists are talking to their patients. An interesting aspect to explore would be the creation of a VRIC App which would take full advantages of the iPad technical capabilities and provide a more streamlined user experience as well as add to the functionality of the system as a whole.
Update on VRIC activity from the end-users side
We’ve been working over the last weeks with VRIC end-users
-gathering requirements for the analysis section of the system. The purpose of this section is to add functionality to the system so that data captured via patient forms may be processed statistically, within VRIC. Tests that would be required to run from data in VRIC include simple statistical analysis to include estimations of variance, of reliability, and of reproducibility -tests for non-parametric significance, correlation, effect size, interobserver and intra-observer K statistics, etc. Also, a general linear model for correlations, Pearson product moment or Spearman’s rank test.
-designing the forms to capture data for the outcome measures that have been requested. At present, we have created the forms for the main outcome measures to assess function of shoulder, elbow, hip and spine.
In addition, end-users are working with their trials, uploading information and sending us feedback on different sections of VRIC. The plan for the next two weeks is to work with the clinical trials, testing the system functionality (including patient forms) and creating the workflows to validate governance.
End of brief summary of progress.
Please, feel free to add a comment or ask a question.
Alejandra
Update on co-design
Our users have been informed of the latest additions to the system and we have started to receive their feedback. One requirement was that of having an auto-save function -à la MS Office- for all those sections where typing is involved. In general, the look of the interface seems to have been well-received as we were not asked to make changes in the colour, font or structure of the web page.
The governance layer …
… at the local level has been reviewed and approved. The contents of the Student trial in those sections are now up-to-date.
New welcome page …
… ready!