Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience.
J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2011 Dec 2;
Authors: Crotty BH, Mostaghimi A, Reynolds EE
Abstract
ObjectiveTo describe the creation and evaluate the use of a wiki by medical residents, and to determine if a wiki would be a useful tool for improving the experience, efficiency, and education of housestaff.Materials and methodsIn 2008, a team of medical residents built a wiki containing institutional knowledge and reference information using Microsoft SharePoint. We tracked visit data for 3 years, and performed an audit of page views and updates in the second year. We evaluated the attitudes of medical residents toward the wiki using a survey.ResultsUsers accessed the wiki 23?218, 35?094, and 40?545 times in each of three successive academic years from 2008 to 2011. In the year two audit, 85 users made a total of 1082 updates to 176 pages and of these, 91 were new page creations by 17 users. Forty-eight percent of residents edited a page. All housestaff felt the wiki improved their ability to complete tasks, and 90%, 89%, and 57% reported that the wiki improved their experience, efficiency, and education, respectively, when surveyed in academic year 2009-2010.DiscussionA wiki is a useful and popular tool for organizing administrative and educational content for residents. Housestaff felt strongly that the wiki improved their workflow, but a smaller educational impact was observed. Nearly half of the housestaff edited the wiki, suggesting broad buy-in among the residents.ConclusionA wiki is a feasible and useful tool for improving information retrieval for house officers.
PMID: 22140210 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]