The Need
“MORE-Darzalas” Foundation was founded in 2010 and has since published 20 scientific multidisciplinary evidence based clinical practice guidelines and numerous of educational books to help oncologists make evidence-based decisions for their patients with oncology diseases. Oncology is one of the most innovative and rapidly growing multidisciplinary specialties in medicine and because of multidisciplinary is more complexed medical area in regard to scientific and practical collaboration between physicians with different specialties. Therefore, scientific information is very dynamic because of system and part innovations and must be constantly updated. MORE Darzalas’ scientific guidelines required enormous efforts on the part of doctors from various specialties to review, create, and then align on the most recent version of the respective guideline and meta-analysis.
It was time to improve that process by incorporating digitization, which would result in increased efficiency and satisfaction for all medical society in Bulgaria transformed to practical acts and improvement of patients’ outcomes.
The Challenge
Some of the challenges we needed to overcome in this project were:
- Preparing a platform for local scientific medical guideline that incorporates latest worldwide innovation and recommendations by established international standards in oncology and allows simultaneous work of many people over a single document, was the first challenge.
- Allows easy compare and merge of multiple working versions for a single guideline.
- Save the specialists time when they have to look for new publications into the oncologists’ specialized online magazines or even changes and updates in international guidelines.
- Consider all requirements for content formatting and visualization. Generating a PDF export file with an entire guideline including all the formats and elements. Complete all functionalities in the designated deadline, which was not changeable since the platform was to be presented to the wide public.
Тhe Solution
After almost nine months of work, our dedicated team was able to deliver the solution.
We created a very interactive system that allows scientific multidisciplinary editorial teams & content editors to work simultaneously on the same guideline, being able to see, approve & merge the changes from each other in real-time dynamic.
Valuabe features that we incorporated:
- Very user-friendly interface (for desktop and mobile)
- Allow multiple versions of every guideline and guideline section to be managed, noted or indicated.
- An advanced Drag & Drop functionality for building complex dynamic “Decision trees”, that could be embedded into the е-guideline and that helps the specialists to build complex “guided decision making” guidelines. Each tree leaf could be linked to a specific guideline section with concrete PICO clinical questions interlinked to the practical needs.
- Well organized process for drafting, approval & publication.
- Process for automated data scraping and notifications for newly published research/data in specialized oncologists’ sites – wrapping all important in organized way.
Value Delivered
The most valuable aspect of MORE Darzalas’ digital platform for scientific medical guidelines is the ability to support medical oncologists in their day-to-day work of easy-searching for the most recent guidelines, information and practical recommendations. Allowing them to provide better outcomes to patients through evidence-based decisions. Allowing the compilation GRADE based standard operating procedures (SOPs) for their healthcare facilities, especially for comprehensive cancer centers. Allowing constant upgrade of oncology workforce knowledge and improving scientific literacy. It is also a great value delivered for scientific content creators because they can browse and align with their colleagues with a single click.
