the gasexchange blog

gasexchange Podcast Interview now up

2010-03-17T01:33:00.001-07:00

Our recent interview with Drs Nahel Saied and Raj Gupta from the 'World of Anesthesiology' podcast is now up. Either listen on-line or download in iTunes. Many thanks to both Nahel and Raj for an enjoyable discussion!

New FAQ up and podcast interview on the way

2010-03-06T16:21:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to let you know our new FAQ is up and on the web. It's much easier to read than the old one and covers the basics very clearly. If there is anything that anyone thinks needs explaining more clearly or that we haven't covered, please let us know via our contact page and we'll work on improving things.

Also, Daniel and I were both interviewed today by Dr Nahel Saied and Dr Raj Gupta who produce the World of Anesthesiology podcast. Look out for this on their website or on iTunes.

New simplified login for gasexchange

2010-02-01T03:02:00.000-08:00

At gasexchange we have long been fans of the OpenID login system that is slowly gaining traction as a unified way of logging into multiple internet sites using only the one login and password. In theory it's great, and it has a wide breadth of support: Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Orange, WordPress to name a few. The open-nature of OpenID along with the focus on providing the user with control over his or her online identity is a noble goal and has great appeal.

These are the reasons that we were happy to initially use OpenID as the (only) method for managing user accounts on gasexchange.

But... for most internet users OpenID is still conceptually hard to understand at first glance. In response to several helpful suggestions from gasexchange users, we are now adding the option of a Plain Old Login™ that will co-exist alongside OpenID. Just as has been used before on many sites across the internet, you can now create a gasexchange account using only your email address, display name and password. While OpenID logins still exist, they are no longer the only way of logging in to gasexchange.

For registered users who currently use OpenID there is naturally no change. On the gasexchange login page simply click on the OpenID tab and enter your OpenID as before. If you somehow manage to create two logins or choose to use an OpenID login in the future, we can easily merge your accounts into one linked to both login methods.

Let's not get too caught up in the mechanics of logins and OpenID — at the end of the day our goal is to facilitate the growth and learning of an open and inclusive online anaesthesia community. Any change we make to gasexchange will always be focused on that singular goal!

Welcome new gasexchange users!

2010-01-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Wow! We have been blown away by the positive reception and great response from the many visitors and new users to gasexchange.

In only a short time we have had visitors from over 50 different countries, ranging from prominent anaesthesia communities in the US, UK, Asia and the European Union, to many other countries where anaesthetists and anesthesiologists practice: Turkey, Morocco, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Martinique, Israel, Russia, Argentina and many, many more.

There have now been visitors to gasexchange from every continent, sans Antarctica (and we're still hoping, given that continent's prominent place in anaesthesia folklore!).

Once again — thank you from the gasexchange team for your support, interest and energy!

Our next 2 screencasts are up

2009-12-21T22:15:00.001-08:00

Just a quick update to let you all know that our next 2 screencasts are up. This completes our series of introductory screencasts. You can find them at gasexchange.com/screencasts.

The first of these covers asking and answering questions. This is a pretty basic topic, but as it is the core of what gasexchange is about, we thought it was worth a few minutes.

The second covers voting and reputation. This is a really important topic and will give you a good understanding of the role reputation plays on gasexchange. After watching it you'll understand the importance of voting for good questions and answers when you see them. It also touches briefly on the topic of badges.

Anyway, you'll get much more out of watching the screencasts than you will out of reading about them so go to our screencast page and start watching them!

Our first 2 screencasts are up

2009-12-09T02:34:00.000-08:00

Firstly, a big welcome to our new users.

This is just a quick note to let you know that our first 2 screencasts are finished and available on gasexchange now. You can find them at gasexchange.com/screencasts.

The first screencast is an introduction to gasexchange. In this screencast we cover the basics of gasexchange including how to navigate the site, and the basics of reputation and tags. It's essential viewing for any new visitors to gasexchange!

The second screencast is arguably the more important. Here we show you how to register and create an account on gasexchange. Our system for doing this is a bit different to the usual website registration and that's why we've devoted an entire screencast to it. We use a system called OpenID. This gives you a generic login that you can use securely on thousands of websites all over the internet. If you already have an account with one of the big online email providers (like gmail or yahoo, but not hotmail) then you already have an OpenID that you can use on gasexchange. If you don't then don't worry, we show you how to get your own OpenID in this screencast.

If this all seems too complicated then don't worry. In the near future we plan on expanding our login system so you can create an account within gasexchange without using OpenID.

Anyway, there's much more information in the screencasts so I suggest you stop reading this and start watching our screencasts straight away!

Which audience?

2009-12-02T19:35:00.000-08:00

Toiling away in secret as we slowly prepared gasexchange, Brad and I repeatedly asked ourselves "who is this actually for?"

We first answered by saying:

“ us ! ”

Our main motivation for creating gasexchange is to better maintain our own knowledge of our craft; to better continue our own medical education — and so that instead of further isolating us from our peers we build a community around a nidus of collected knowledge and opinion.

The trap of sharing knowledge and techniques only with those you work with — or even just those anaesthetists and intensivists with whom you share a country — is missing out on the most diverse, different and challenging aspects of our practice. Even today there exists fundamental aspects of our work that we each take for granted (cricoid pressure, reversal of muscle relaxants, cuffed paediatric tubes...) yet are practiced very differently across national borders.

When we work in isolation, evidence-free dogma clothes itself in the gown of accepted practice.

So we have built gasexchange to collect knowledge and establish a dialogue between like-minded anaesthetists, and most notably with those who are not like of mind. Courteous dissent is not tolerated, it is encouraged.

The first target tribe for gasexchange is consultant medical anaesthetists and anaesthesiologists — not because other groups are less important, but rather to establish a broad foundation of knowledge and domain experts who share the same interest and enthusiasm for the project. With time we hope there will be equal involvement from trainees, perfusionists, anaesthetic technicians, nurse anaesthetists, and other non-medical anaesthetists fostering the diversity that fuels our specialty.

For now, jump in, sign up and have some fun.

gasexchange — How it Works

2009-11-26T02:03:00.000-08:00

Traditional online communities, like discussion forums, do not work well for sharing up to date and evidence based knowledge. Useful information is quickly lost among off-topic discussion, arguments or other lesser-quality posts — the signal to noise ratio is just far too low!

Add to this the difficulty in assessing the authority of users' posts and the time to wade through pages of disorganised information to find what may be relevant, and it's obvious that the traditional discussion forum is a broken tool. A discussion forum will only ever be that — a place for discussion — not a solution for organising and keeping up-to-date with rapidly changing medical knowledge.

The internet has so far failed to provide the medical community with better access to collected knowledge and experience. The greatest achievement to date has been searchable online archives of journal publications.

But we need a solution to the problem of information overload. Our ability to stay informed and knowledgeable will not only become more important with each passing year, but critically, will also become a much more difficult task. Our focus on ever narrowing specialisation risks that we loose sight of what we can learn from other domain areas; both within medicine and outside.

As we focus by necessity on a smaller number of very high quality trials and publications, we also risk devaluing and loosing the knowledge that cannot be captured and shared this way: expert opinions, anaesthetist experiences after decades of practice, ideas and observations from other domains.

gasexchange is founded on two simple yet powerful features that address these problems: applying real-time peer-review to a greater range of information, and organisation using tags. We apply these features to a question and answer model as a framework for capturing collective knowledge — though, as you'll quickly discover when using gasexchange, 'questions' and 'answers' can cover many different kinds of information.

Real-time Peer Review

gasexchange uses a community voting system giving every user the ability to vote up or down the questions and answers on the site. If a user reads a question that they think is interesting, clearly worded and useful to others in the community then an up vote may be awarded. Similarly a clear, accurate and helpful 'answer' may also be voted up.

The votes that a question receives determine where it appears in the gasexchange system, and the votes that answers receive determine the order in which they are shown. Thus you can always be confident of finding the most interesting, accurate and highly rated information quickly, even if you only have a few stolen moments between cases to browse the site.

Just as in real life, voting has an effect on a user's reputation. Up votes increase the reputation of the user posting the question or answer, and down votes reduce the reputation by a small amount. A user's reputation is both displayed alongside their username, allowing other users to see how the community judges their level of 'authority', and also confers increasing responsibilities and powers on users as their reputation grows.

Organisation using Tags

The depth and breadth of anaesthesia and intensive care knowledge is huge. Attempts to force artificial organisational systems on this, though often necessary, all create trade-offs. When we categorise a question asking about the 'best regional technique providing analgesia after knee surgery', we need to make a judgement as to whether this is most appropriate for the 'regional' category, the 'orthopedic' category, or the 'analgesia' category.

To avoid this problem and allow for a more flexible and organic method of organisation, gasexchange uses a system of 'tags'. A tag is just like a label that you would use in the real world to categorise an item - and just like in the real world an item can have more than one tag. Our question above could be tagged 'regional', 'orthopedics', 'analgesia' and even 'acute-pain' and 'post-op', depending on what the user asking the question considers appropriate.

Because other users with sufficient reputation can 're-tag' questions, the community can further refine the organisation as needed.

Community Driven

The glue that binds these features together is the gasexchange community itself. Not only is the community the source of questions and answers, but through peer-review, reputation, organisation, self-editing and other features that encourage positive community behaviour while discouraging the bad, the community drives and directs the very future of gasexchange.

The knowledge captured and shared through the site then becomes a snapshot of what is considered important by a huge body of professionals from throughout the world.

More information explaining the many features of gasexchange can be found in our Frequently Asked Questions or by watching one of our screencasts. Although different from how many online communities have traditionally worked, you will quickly discover how natural and intuitive the gasexchange system is — have a look and get started today!

In the beginning...

2009-11-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

Fifty years ago, before many of today's anaesthetists were even born, there were only a handful of information sources to consider. While our specialty was rapidly progressing, most published information was still restricted to a few 'big picture' domain areas covering the core of anaesthesia lore. Anaesthesia education was still very strongly grounded in an uneasy balance between apprenticeship and didactic learning from a small number of canonical texts.

This was a time when it was still conceivable for a dedicated clinician to learn all that there was to know about our craft.

Fast forward to today and 'information overload' has become the defining challenge for many professionals. A quick look on PubMed shows almost 140 journals covering anaesthesia, intensive care, resuscitation or pain medicine. Amazon returns almost 1,300 books and Google 1.3 million pages! This does not even quantify the immense collected knowledge held in the minds of experienced anaesthetists and intensivists all over the world.

How are we to maintain our knowledge and continue our education in the face of such overwhelming odds? How can we assist anaesthetists in lower-resourced countries to do the same?

Brad and I are working on the beginning of a solution to this growing problem. A way of sharing and learning anaesthesia, resuscitation, intensive care and pain knowledge accessible to every anaesthetist, anesthesiologist and intensivist. Regardless of whether you're a resident just starting your training, a nurse anaesthetist or anaesthesia technician, or a consultant with forty years of experience, there will be something new you can learn and something you can contribute back to the global anaesthesia community.

What I'm talking about is gasexchange.com — a real-time, peer-reviewed, global anaesthesia community, asking and answering questions and organically sharing our collective knowledge.

Think of it as a modern take on the traditional academic journal, mixing aspects of wikipedia and community contribution along with a healthy dash of tea-room advice, discussion and debate.

We hope that over time gasexchange will become the first place that old and new anaesthetists alike visit to find answers to anaesthesia questions, to return their knowledge back to the global community, and to further their own professional development.

Over the coming weeks as Brad and I prepare the system for public launch we'll describe some of the features unique to gasexchange that make these goals achievable.