P=MD, a student-run online system, links students at the University of Irvine, School of Medicine’s (UCI-SOM) distant medical campuses across Orange County and Los Angeles County. The system includes Web 2.0-based features such as discussion boards, wikis, news feeds, integrated calendaring, collaborative note sharing, and groupware. P=MD stimulates UCI medical student academic and extracurricular life. Social media-based IT systems such as P=MD can improve the collaborative, collegial environment in residency and hospital settings, forge informal links among specialists, and stimulate dialogue in medical societies.medical societies.
The P=MD system runs on a customized Drupal 6 open-source content management system, which powers sites such as WhiteHouse.gov, The Economist, and Examiner.com. The system runs on a LAMP software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
I spent over 500 hours engineering and developing this project on my spare time; countless student volunteers have contributed content and maintained the community. Current features include:
• discussion boards
• voting & polling systems
• stream-of-information homepage
• subscriptions & groups for each organization & class
• per-group and site-wide calendars
• user profiles & messaging
• quotes board
• wiki with revision-history & WYSIWYG HTML editor
As a result, communication has become easier at UCI-SOM. The website has also introduced intangible elements: culture of sharing and collaboration among students. Since its introduction, P=MD has welcomed over 400 users and more than 10,000 posts.
pmd-poster-for-md-mba-conference-pressThe installed contrib modules include:
• Organic Groups — Used to construct the front page
• Subscriptions and subscriptions_og
• Userpoints — Every time a user edits the wiki, adds a post, or adds a comment, they earn points.
• Extra Voting Forms — Vote up/down a post.
• Wikitools, Freelinking — Make the book module act more like a wiki.
• FCKEditor — WYSIWYG editing.
• HTML Corrector — To close HTML tags in teaser views.
• CCK and Views
• Diff — Show the difference between posts.
Imagecache, Imagecache Profile — Create different-sized thumbnails of users’ avatars.