Science 2.0 Impacting Outcomes of Clinical Care at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Nationwide Children’s Hospital is one participant in a global bulletin board that takes advantage of online tools to advance the care and clinical outcomes of children with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.  ImproveCareNow.org is an easy and low-cost system of sharing treatment information through an online information network that allows caregivers to systematically collect and share data about the latest treatment methods and their effectiveness.  Preliminary data shows that under the program, the percentage of patients in remission from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis has increased more than 20 percent in a 27-month period. 

“ImproveCareNow represents an entirely new model to speed discoveries into practice by harnessing the motivation and collective intelligence of the physicians, care teams and families.  Healthcare reform depends on innovative programs like these that can produce improved outcomes for patients,” says Patrick Conway, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, US Department of Health and Human Services.

Even though the program focuses on Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the model could easily be used for care with other chronic conditions and it could do so more quickly and at a fraction of the cost of other approaches. 

ImproveCareNow is part of a growing movement among researchers known as Science 2.0.  Science 2.0 holds that the collective wisdom of sharing data, research and information can rapidly advance the impact and outcomes of scientific discovery.  A similar program has been launched by OSU professor Daral Jackwood, director of the OSU Center for Diagnostic Assays in the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.  Jackwood and his colleagues launched DiagnosticSpeak.com to serve as a global forum for professionals involved in animal and plant infectious disease diagnostics. 

For more details on ImproveCareNow, see the release from Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

For more information on DiagnosticSpeak, Click here