Information Mastery requires two different approaches to managing information:
{"Image DocumentName": "Information Mastery requires two different approaches to managing information:", "Image ImageDescription": "Foraging - a method of being alerted to new relevant, valid information when it is published. Hunting - a method of finding information when it is needed. NPC would add a third:- Hot-synching \u2013 clinicians rapidly checking once or, at the most, twice a year that their key approaches for the management of conditions they see commonly still match the best evidence. DN Need a link on NPCi to Dave and Allen\u2019s paper describing how to select a foraging service. Both clinicians and patients rate keeping up to date very highly. We discussed in the second workshop in this overview the information explosion and the resulting overload. The question is what tactics can be employed to manage the information. Two American professors \u2013 Dave Slawson and Allen Shaughnessy \u2013 came up with the Information Mastery concept and first published on it in They\u2019ve described foraging as the first key approach. Everyone needs a service that alerts them to the key \u2013 and we\u2019ll define the characterisitics that comprise key in a moment \u2013 the key new research in their specialty. Let\u2019s use our NPC approach as an example. Five years ago we developed our own in house electronic currrent awareness bulletin. Our information scientist selected key websites with us \u2013 sites that would publish on a daily weekly, monthly or irregularly new developments relating to prescribing therapeutics and medicines management. So for example we\u2019d capture policy developments as well as new clinical trials. We developed some selection criteria for the new information published on those sites\u2026\u2026.and the service became so useful to us in-house that we rapidly made it available to anyone who wished to subscribe. We also devised some criteria for selecting the greatest hits of the daily digest and provide a weekly digest for those wanting a once a week update, rather than a once a day. More than 4,000 now subscribe. There are lots of services available that do this now for different audiences\u2013 and some are much better than others. As well as simple lists like our eCAB, there\u2019s a need for a service that takes just the key new developments and both critically appraises the new data and sets those findings in the context of the rest of the evidence. We do that with our NPCi blog service \u2013 2 or 3 key papers a week. The key feature of relying on foraging is that some one else \u2013 preferably a trusted public sector organisation \u2013 does the selection and critical appraisal for the subscribers. We don\u2019t expect clinicians to read journals, select the papers to appraise and then incorporate the new data into their practice. We do the selection and appraisal, leaving clinicians to concentrate on what they need to do and are skilled at doing. This is a young science and developments are taking place all the time. We\u2019ve recently recognised we need to put levels on evidence into the blogs, for example. As well as foraging, clinicians need an approach to finding information when its needed, when they are stuck . The appraoch need to be to finding the best answer , not just an answer. We\u2019ll come to that in a minute. Over time, we\u2019ve added a third approach \u2013 which links to a new and more logical approach to continuous professional development. It\u2019s crazy to expect clinicians to be up to date with conditions they see rarely \u2013 the volume of material is too large to handle and by the time they see a condition its likely they\u2019ll have forgotten what they learnt \u2013 or worse remembered what they learned incorrectly. So its unreasonable to expect a GP to know without checking how to manage hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, but entirely reasonable to expect a tertiary centre cardiologist to. Similarly, its unreasonable to expect a cardiologist to be up to date in managing depression in the postnatal period, but you\u2019d expect a GP to be on the button. And yet the cardiologist ought to be spot on when managing depression in people after a heart attack. Multiple surveys have shown clinicians can spend a maximum of an hour a week keeping up to date. That\u2019s enough time for a little foraging and then each year as a minimum hot synching. Hot synching is a term used in computing when one device connects to another and their memories update each other. I was describing the process of covering the key evidence in the 30 or so conditions a clinician sees commonly swiftly on a regular cycle when talking to some family medicine residents in the States and one of them said You mean like hot synching \u2013 and that\u2019s exactly it. You\u2019ll note we\u2019ve designed NPCi specifically to enable hot synching for the common conditions in primary care and those topics as appropriate for some of the requirements of some specialist too. But with our resources we\u2019re never going to be able to cover, for example lots of oncology because there are a hundred different cancers all with their own evidence base, or cover the requirements of orthopaedic hand surgeons, liver transplant teams and so on. But the same principles apply to people working in those fields.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}