Niall's Notes

Well I have recently been involved with a project called the James Lind Alliance Neuro-oncology Group. This 12 month project aims to gather questions that people - from patients to carers to medical professionals - have about brain cancer or spine cancer. 

The goal is to gather these questions and then sort them into questions that have been answered and those questions that have not yet been answered - uncertainties. 

Why ask patients and carers, why not leave it to the researchers? Well turn that question on it's head. Why should researchers who have special or vested interests get to drive the research agenda? Why not focus research on what matters most to patients, carers and other non-research folk. 

The issue arises in the number of responses that JLA studies generate. There can easily be 1000 + questions asked - in free text form. AKA a bloody nightmare in terms of searching, sorting and filtering. How many variations can you ask a medical questions on a tumor? The number is > 1 the upper limit is unknown, but high. 

The issue is you need an expert to identify whether or not questions are similar. These are medical questions after all. However, two medical professionals could disagree about whether or not a question is the same, and so you need a specialist medical professional to review, and then a peer to review to make sure that there is not vested interests. Then you have to construct a question that covers all the variation so there needs to be collaboration. 

In other words doing this for 1000 + questions is a royal pain in the ass (and very, very time consuming). What's more this is doctors time, which is very expensive.

Guess how this process is currently done. Yep you are right, via email and day long face-to-face meetings, which are expensive and annoyingly inefficient. So there is a brilliant opportunity to build something that could help doctors save time and do a better job or categorising and collaboration on these important questions. 

What is needed is a place where the doctors involved in the project can log in to a web-based system and see two questions (rather than people) side by side and say whether they are hot (similar) or not. 

The doctor could then tag each question allowing questions to be group into specialities, i.e. a question relating to brain cancer in paediatrics. Then specialists could view the tagged questions that are relevant for their area. 

Another part of the application would be a straightforward commenting system allowing the doctors to converse and collaborate on various questions.  

Finally, the doctors need to be able to assign a question to a "final version question". 

Some basic metrics and gamification could make this process more enjoyable. I.e. a leaderboard to see which doctor in the group has sifted through the most number of questions or seeing a progress bar to see real time progress. 

The number of doctors / health professionals involved in a project is about 10-15, and are usually well dispersed around in the United Kingdom. This makes a day meeting very very expensive, especially since most of the doctors are either surgeons or consultants. 

Cost per doctor (approximately)

Transport - £150

Accommodation - £ 80

Breakfast - £10

Lunch - £20

Venue - £10 

Opportunity Cost (for the day) = £275 (based on a salary of £100,000)

Overall estimated cost for a one day meeting per doctor is £545 or £5450  - £8,175 overall. 

Multiply this by the number of JLA projects per year and it starts to really add up. This cost also excludes the time spent outside of the meeting following up on actions and sorting questions. I would say in total a single JLA project probably costs in the region of £30,000 - £50,000. 

What if this software could make the process of filtering x2 as time/cost efficient as the manual way? Well we could help save £15,000 - £25,000 per project, which is pretty neat. 

- Spec the software 

- Set up GitHub / Project page / Open Source terms. 

- Gather team. 

- Code like mad. 

- Release to test within 1 JLA project. 

If you want to get involved or know someone who might, or want to suggest a cool feature etc then just leave comments below.  

Well you get the idea... 

I was reading this article by Clare Sheppard recently which is a call to action for young people to get more involved in politics. It's a pretty good article and I commented on it to add that maybe we should take an aim at the political system with technology, since we as: brilliant, gifted and ... modest ... young people get this (technology) shit. Init. 

I made a passing remark about being "Gov Hackers" and I guess it was maybe my own boredom but I actually got thinking about what a "Gov Hacker" would look like and what would they do? Although, I guess I think that about most people who postfix the word Hacker to their job-title.  

I guess to get the ball rolling I would define a Gov Hacker as someone who has a firm handle on technology and uses this to influence politicians and or political movements. I suppose at this point I probably have the NSA and GCHQ alarms going off with the words Gov and Hacker, so for the benefit of these guys and any other politician reading this then please see here for what is meant. 

Maybe there is room in the market for a Software-as-a-Service app which allows you to "track" and communicate with your local MP / MSP / Senator / Congressman etc... It would involve pulling in all feeds (Twitter, Blogs, Google Alerts) that the politician would have and allow easy communication to that ..... elected representative. 

There should obviously be a function whereby the user of the application could see the expenses that the politician has submitted - but may this is a "premium" feature. Also, the user should be able to see how the politician has voted (if they have bothered to show up) and link back through to petitions from sites such as change.org. In fact Change.org has a nice little REST API  for developers so this could be done without much hassle. 

Getting general traction would be done through signup / sign in with Twitter or Facebook account. OAuth helps us here. Share to followers / FB wall. Job done. 

Sharing is important here. If something impresses you or more likely annoys you about what your politician is doing then you need to share this. Maybe attach Twitter accounts of the local rags to each politician and if they are high profile then tweet to @bbcnickrobinson. Maybe journalists would actually use the tool in the first instance to keep on top of these folks. 

Should we limit the number of politicians a user can stalk? The last thing we want is users being overwhelmed with information and we don't want to scare off the politicians either. User engagement == political engagement which is the aim of this game. 

Might add to this later but I think that is enough for now...