title: A collaborative clinical trial protocol writing system.
abstract: Increasing complexity in medicine has caused clinical trial experts with disparate backgrounds from multiple organizations to collaborate when developing clinical trial protocols. Although many protocol-authoring tools provide computerbased decision support to assist in protocol writing, few of them provide sufficient collaboration support for a group of protocol writers. The iterative group writing activities among interdisciplinary clinical trial experts call for advanced tool support. Here we present a web-based protocol writing system with integrated support for collaborative reviewing and collaborative editing. The system uses a shared database to store threaded review comments and version information for electronic protocols. It also captures rich group event information to provide cross-activity awareness and to facilitate self-coordination within the collaborative writing team. We believe that our system can help streamline collaborative clinical trial protocol writing processes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, University of Washington, Seattle, USA. cweng@u.washington.edu
authors.forename: Chunhua
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weng
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Gennari
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: McDonald
mesh_terms: D002985:Clinical Protocols; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D019992:Databases as Topic; D006801:Humans; D033183:Interdisciplinary Communication; D020407:Internet; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D014956:Writing