SCCMPIWG Minutes

1/24/1999

San Francisco

Attendance:

Barry Markovitz, Carl Weigle, Susan Day, Steven Nemerson, Tim Hartzog, Michael Conner, Noorulah Akhtar, Hamid Latif, Hector Pabon, Mariano Fiallos, Judy Verger, Joe DiCarlo.
 

Minutes:

Introductions


Introductions were made, and a sign-up sheet circulated. It was noted that the turnout was, at least at the beginning, quite small, probably owing to the simultaneous meeting of several other pediatric interest groups at SCCM.
 

PedsCCM


Barry distributed a handout for perusal (and return) which was a hefty document to be presented to the organizations which have supported PedsCCM in the past, to outline the activities of the web site and to justify a request for ongoing support. Highlights of the document included a brief summary of PedsCCM's activity and growth over the past year, as well as the detailed server log analysis noted below.

Organizational support of PedsCCM
A detailed budget outlining last year's expenses and support of PedsCCM by the Section on Critical Care of the AAP, the Pediatric Section of SCCM, and the 1997 Pediatric Critical Care Colloquium was circulated. The requests and justification for 1999 was reviewed. Included were extensive server log analyses including page requests and "hits", terms searched for, specific pages requested, download requests, referring sites, duration of visits, country codes of site visitors and more. During 1998, 149,474 visits (accesses with less than 30 minutes of idle time between requests) by 61,363 unique hosts from 71 countries requested 369,868 pages of information and downloaded 14,624 files. A total of 11.95 gigabytes of data was transferred. Copies of these documents or additional details are available upon request.

What is the vision for PedsCCM? For example, how is All-Net different from paper based textbooks?
  • All-Net is:
    • international, in several languages
    • constantly updated
    • hyperlinked to supporting material
    • copyright held by author, not publisher
    • available in parts of the world where current paper journals and texts are very hard to get
  • Organizations should support the minimal costs of Web based publication - it is much cheaper than paper publishing.
  • PedsCCM is a good place to more informally store teaching material, developed for local use such as: 
    • resident handouts
    • fellow's slide shows
    • simple guidelines.
Need better indexing for PedsCCM, to include related material placed in various areas. Agreed, a task to work on. A search engine is available for users to pull such material together, and will be updated.
What is the relationship between PedsCCM and the Virtual PICU? See below. The current major focus for the VPICU is clinical database definition and development. PedsCCM is a WWW home for original and linked information relating to pediatric critical care medicine. Eventually, the VPICU may be a common home for PedsCCM, the PICU list, All-Net, etc.
VPICU
Randall Wetzel is leading the Virtual PICU (VPICU) effort to establish a standard minimal database for pediatric critical care, with a generous endowment from the Laura and Leland K. Whittier Foundation. The Pediatric Critical Care Study Group (PCCSG) has merged its data collection efforts (PCCSGNet), led by Steve Pon, with the VPICU. Other committed groups include a collaborative group from the eastern US, led by Doug Willson, and the National Association of Children's Hospitals and Related Institutions (NACHRI). The group is also in discussions with the Project Impact team from SCCM.

As a secondary goal, the VPICU may serve eventually as the common home for all Internet based resources for pediatric critical care.

Electronic Journal
An electronic journal of pediatric critical care medicine was much discussed 2 years ago as an organ of the PCCC, but little interest emerged worldwide subsequent to the gathering at the PCCC. It is rumored that SCCM may be interested now in promoting a pediatric critical care medicine journal, but the degree of interest in an electronic medium is unknown to the SCMPIWG membership.
SCCM CME on the WWW
The education division at SCCM is very small, and there is the possibility that SCCM might support the All-Net approach, linked via the SCCM WWW site. Along these lines, Barry, as Chair of the SCCM Electronics Communication Committee, will promote discussion of enhancing the content of the SCCM WWW site, with material like CCM, New Horizons, and any contemplated Peds CCM periodical.
All-Net Demo
Joe DiCarlo gave a demonstration of a recently formatted talk on arrhythmias. This talk was submitted as a PowerPoint presentation with a companion word processing document to Joe, who then reformatted it as a layered WWW document, offering a varying amount of detail to suit various potential readers, and facilitating translation into several languages. Multimedia components were added, including video clips, anatomic drawings, ECG details, etc. The document was also reformatted into a ".pdf" file so that anyone using any platform could download an elegantly printable document for distribution. Joe's demo was very enthusiastically received.
PICU List
Message traffic has remained stable while the subscribership continues to grow steadily (well over 2,000 now). The inability to search the message archives via the WWW has been a frustration for about 2 years. There is a new version of the Listproc software which runs the list, and that new version includes enhanced WWW functions, including the subscriber ability to manage their subscription configuration, or view archived messages. As an alternative, a WWW-based discussion forum could be established now using WebCrossing software being used now by Skip Nelson's MCWIRB discussion group for IRB members. The current version of WebCrossing, however, has limited e-mail functionality and the interface has proved difficult for some MCWIRB members to use. The consensus of those present was to stay the course until a software change would produce a clear benefit to Carl Weigle as manager, and/or to the list subscribers.
Academic Credit for WWW publications
There is slowly increasing credit given by academic centers to WWW publishing. Sue Day is working on the All-Net textbook as a sabbatical project, and promotions have been aided by evidence of substantial electronic publication.
Planned Report to the Business Meeting of the Pediatric Section of SCCM
Barry, Randall, and Joe will summarize all of the above, and urge more submissions of original material. Of  note, the Evidence Based Medicine Journal Club has benefited from the increased attention paid by fellowship programs submitting reviews produced as part of the fellowship training process.

Minutes taken and submitted by Carl Weigle. Back to SCCMPIWG home page

Document created February 4, 1999
http://pedsccm.org/ORG-MEET/SCCM-PEDS/sccmpiwg_minutes_0199.html