We gathered together a team of medical and computer science faculty and students to design and implement the system. Additional sponsorship came from the Canadian Cochrane Network Dalhousie Site. Generally, the people developing information systems are divorced from those who actually use them. In our setting, the medical students worked in close proximity with the computer science students during system development and implementation. The computer science students were enrolled in a co-op program, so had an opportunity to build on their prior work experience.
Medical informatics is multidisciplinary and uses collaborative approaches to solve problems.
Members of the team had training and experience in informatics, family medicine, medical quality assurance, health services administration, health services accreditation, population health, medical education, computer science, information retrieval, and communication technologies. In addition, we included articles published on Dalhousie-based health outcomes research in asthma and cardiovascular disease. The total number of articles was 100. A subset of articles addressed co-morbid conditions. Five of the multiple-item scales were generic, so items were not associated with a condition in Table 1.