Peer Review Status: Externally Peer Reviewed by the Department of Internal Medicine Virtual Hospital Editorial Board
Organization and Membership
The editorial board is composed of Department of Medicine faculty appointed by the Department Chair to serve at the Department Chair's discretion. The current board consist of 6 members including a board chairman. Membership includes the Department Associate Chair for Education, the Director of Departmental Continuing Education, the M3 clerkship director, and 3 ad hoc members.
Activities
The Editorial Board identifies four interrelated activities to accomplish its stated purpose:
1. Work with the Departmental faculty to establish and review the core areas of information to develop for electronic media. These will include identifying and organizing information related to the clinical, educational, and research activities of the department, identifying and organizing a core educational curriculum, and identifying topics for continuing medical education development.
2. Facilitate content development by departmental faculty. The editorial board will assist faculty members in developing their materials for electronic format. The assistance includes helping the faculty identify available institutional resources (Information Commons, Virtual Hospital staff, OCRME staff, Second Look Computing, etc.), helping the faculty use the available institutional resources, and coordinate interrelated program development across the department. This editorial board will thus assist in program development from the beginning of a project.
3. Establish a peer review system for content developed within the department. To maintain high quality, it is essential that we peer review content developed within the department. The editorial board will coordinate these reviews using the well-established model used by traditional publications. When the content is completely developed for electronic format, the editorial board together with the content developer will identify at least two experts to review the content. There will be two levels of review available, internal and external review, and the completed program will be clearly marked as to the level of review. For reviewing purposes, the program will be made available to reviewers on the Virtual Hospital server by password only. The reviewers' role will be to identify deficiencies, controversies, or areas where the content could be improved. We anticipate that after review every project developed will be published on the Virtual Hospital' . The Chairman of the editorial board will resolve all potential conflicts among authors, reviewers, and the editorial board members.
4. Provide continuing review of program acceptance, use, or problems using the electronic format. This continuing review will allow for developing new information about distant and electronic learning in medicine. We can apply the information we gain in this review to further assist faculty in developing future programs.
Steps in Submitting and Developing Programs
This is an outline of the steps in initiating and developing information.
1. Faculty submit a proposal to the Editorial Board for a program. Included in this proposal is a title, brief description, and a time line. The faculty member can request any level of support from the Board at this time.
2. After reviewing the proposal (within 7 days of submission), the Board will respond with:
3. The Board will serve as a resource for the faculty member as needed and will coordinate the faculty interaction with the Virtual Hospital' staff. In addition, the Board will work with the author to design the materials in a standard format.
4. As the program nears completion, the Board together with the faculty will identify either internal or external reviewers for the program. As part of the review process, the author will be asked to anticipate the useful life of the material. The Board will contact the reviewers, collect their comments, and make recommendations to the author regarding improvements based on the reviews.
5. Once approved, the content will become a part of the Departmental Virtual Hospital' content and will be identified by its level of review.
6. The Board will provide ongoing review of the frequency with which the material is accessed and any problems that occur. They will then work with the author to correct any problems. When the program has been available for its anticipated life, the committee will ask the author to review and update the materials to assure that the content is current. If the author or a surrogate does not provide the review within one month of being asked, the program will be removed from the departmental materials.
Current Editorial Board membership:
F. Jeffrey Field, M.D., Chairman
Michael W. Peterson, M.D.
Joel Gordon, M.D.
James Flanagan, M.D.
Geoffrey McLennan, M.D.
John MacIndoe, M.D.