Syndicom

Smart mobs and clinical trials

In 2003, Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs wrote that particular technologies radically reorganized the ways in which individuals cooperated in societies. Rheingold, one of the first scholars to discuss the rise of virtual community in his case study of The Well, is considered an authority on the ways in which society is shifting to accommodate emerging forms of ‘togetherness’ wrought by our technological friends.

Smart Mobs cover

Smart mobs, wrote Rheingold, “consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don’t know each other. The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities” (p. xii). These days, the rise of the Web 2.0 technologies and the participatory web they construct encourage professional communities to open lines of communication, decentralize authority, free information to be shared and to consider the market as a conversation. This is a radical idea for the medical community. It is an even more radical practice. But as surgeons who participate in SpineConnect, a collaborative community of surgeon-researchers attest, it is a highly effective means of getting work done, supporting each other in challenging cases and innovating practice.
Let’s take the case of clinical trial management as an example. Any surgeon or researcher who has ever had to run or participate in a multi-center, randomized, controlled clinical trial knows it is fraught with challenges. How do you get distributed researchers together routinely to discuss the cases? How do you avoid miscommunication, over communication or ambiguity when working across time and space? How can you reduce the potential for misinterpretation of inclusion and exclusion criteria when dealing with multiple researchers? How do you meet planned timelines and trial goals? The list of potholes on the road to innovation seems endless and many of them have to do with our ideas about time and space as fixed concrete entities. But as the technologies of web 2.0 show us, they are anything but.
Web based collaborative communities, as Rheingold wrote, are smart mobs. Smart because of their knowledge resources, smart because of their ability to bend and transcend physical time and space, smart because they simultaneously co-ordinate (to act together in a smooth concerted way) and are a coordinate (specific location on a plane; an equal rank or level of authority). But, in the world of clinical trials, web based collaborative communities are also smart because they are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.

Kirsten Broadfoot