Portable Knowledge + Fluid Collaboration = Center(ing) of Excellence
When we think about centers of excellence, what comes to mind?
State of the art buildings and equipment? Innovative research projects and programs? The sharpest minds on the planet? Urban or metropolitan locations? All of the above? These all sound like extraordinary attributes and strengths to house in one place but what could be the downside of siting the creme de la creme of a specialty in such a manner? For one, there is the impoverishment of other perhaps more rural locales. There may also be a consequence of isolation for those professionals and researchers who are not situated within centers of excellence. Finally, there is always the chance that the innovative process remains exclusionary, housed within specific walls, for specific participants, both professional and lay alike.
So what happens when we begin to reframe the idea of ‘centers of excellence’ as a process? A ‘centering of excellence’ if you will. First, we dislocate the process from a physical locale and we begin to consider other forms of practice and process that construct our understandings of excellence and of centering. Then, we allow for diverse forms of participation from diverse locales and instead of foregrounding the ‘center’ we foreground ‘excellence’ as it exists in the inter-actions of participants. Finally, when we focus on the ‘centering of excellence’, we also set free ‘knowledge’, created as it may be in some temporal and spatial domain. We realize that excellence, just as knowledge, resides within and between people. This makes knowledge portable and people valuable.
Last week we discussed the notion of ‘fluid collaboration’ which happens spontaneously over time, anywhere that involved different people thinking about and working on the same thing; the kind of collaboration that happens when people are in sync, linked in thought. Fluid collaboration does not necessarily require a ‘center of excellence’ but it is fundamental to the ‘centering of excellence’. SpineColorado experienced such a centering of excellence recently in their clinical research project on the use of IV steroids in cervical fusion results. While SpineColorado is itself a regional center of excellence, this particular study was multisite, with none of the sites participating possessing the considerable resources required to undertake the project. To overcome this challenge, Dr Jim Youssef of SpineColorado approached Syndicom to explore whether their SpineConnect community of which several of the research project surgeons were already members, might be able to help. As he says, “the other surgeons collaborating on the study were already SpineConnect members so I felt that by using similar tools, the learning curve would be low and the training costs negligible.” SpineConnect allowed the participating surgeons, from Cleveland Clinic Foundation, UCLA Spine Center and SpineColorado to quickly enter their data into a customized but familiar template form, store the data in location, which enabled its rapid and easy compilation and portability, not to mention simultaneous access from multiple sites, which allowed participating surgeons to see the same data as the study unfolded, facilitating fluid collaboration. SpineConnect removed traditional obstacles of silo-ed research and redundancies or duplications of effort in the data collection and analysis processes, freeing up the participating surgeons to work on the ‘higher order’ research tasks of data interpretation, discussion and extensions. With its web based collaborative platform making knowledge portable but also accessible and facilitating fluid collaboration SpineConnect ‘centers’ excellence in spine surgery, clinical trials and professional practice.
With thanks to Martin LaBar and avlxyz at flickr for the superb images!
Kirsten Broadfoot
Tags: centers of excellence, cervical fusion, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, clinical trials, collaboration, excellence, innovative research, multisite research, participation, portable knowledge, professional practice, spine surgery, SpineColorado, spineconnect, syndicom, UCLA Spine
