One of my mountain biking artist friends is often overheard telling others on the trail when encountering a technical section, “speed is your friend”. Our family physician was also often overheard saying ‘more haste, less speed’. These two diverse expressions of professional artistry revolve around the experience of ‘coodinated velocity’ or the speed that comes from Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, a speed based in optimal experience.

Optimal experience, according to Csikszentmihalyi is something that we make happen; it is an experience borne out of voluntarily stretching one’s body or mind to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Most artists and professionals will say that these experiences are never painless, but they are often considered great moments in our lives. In the long run, these optimal experiences bring us a sense of mastery through participating; an order in consciousness.

Now try experiencing that with others. While painful individually sustaining coordinated velocity, the sheer force of numbers can soon turn any form of coordination or ‘order in consciousness’ on its head. Think Pamplona – the running of the bulls – velocity, yes. Coordinated, ah, no…..

And yet, when working in research, and especially in spinal surgery, coordinated velocity is essential. Just ask Dr. Jim Youssef, a partner at SpineColorado. Jim was running a multicenter collaborative clinical research study on the effect of IV steroids on cervical fusion results. He had surgeons from SpineColorado, Cleveland Clinic Foundation and UCLA Spine Center, 30 odd patient cases and an abstract deadline for the Cervical Spine Research Society Annual Meeting to coordinate! As Jim Youssef puts it ” we needed a way to manage the study that didn’t require an inordinate amount of staff and resources.”

Working with his SpineConnect colleagues from Cleveland and UCLA, Dr Youssef designed customized forms for demographic and diagnostic data collection. Further streamlining the data management and analysis processes through standardized formats and enabling simultaneous access and interaction from multiple sites enabled the team to complete the study in less than two weeks, including the abstract for the conference! In describing his optimal experience, Thomas Mroz of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation put it this way, “I will definitely be using SpineConnect in any future research endeavors. The ease in which we were able to compile these cases and extract the data certainly makes it an invaluable resource for any research study.” Yes, speed is your friend and good things happen when we connect!

With thanks to pbo31on Flickr for the photo!

Kirsten Broadfoot

Tags: cervical fusion, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, clinical research, collaboration, coordination, flow, Jim Youssef, speed, spinal surgery, SpineColorado, spineconnect, Thomas Mroz, UCLA

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Blog.