Towards collective intelligence in a national community of physicians

Abstract

Collective intelligence is shared or group intelligence that emerges from collaborative effort. We propose to harness collective intelligence through the specific tasks of producing and sharing constructive comments on synopses of clinical research, disseminated to a national community of physician members of the Canadian Medical Association. This proposal uses the power of many to bring the collective wisdom and resources of a community of physicians back to the individual. Building on an active program of continuing education to raise awareness of synopses of new clinical research for physicians, we describe the characteristics of a new system to be built upon an existing web platform. This new platform will offer physicians an opportunity to read and share their comments on Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters (POEMs), with other physicians, which will stimulate collective intelligence. In turn, this will further benefit the education of these physicians and help to improve the decisions they make in everyday clinical practice. Knowing about this endeavour may be of benefit to the community of information professionals in multiple fields, who seek to improve their use of evidence-based abstracts of scientific publications and experience-based (information users’ comments) information in their daily work.