Performance Online is the next stage of medical research, according to the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In a keynote speech to the National Society of Medicine’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Dr. Stephen L. Jlo said that while online performance research is a good idea, he believes that the technology will only get better over time.
“We don’t need to have a thousand or more people doing these experiments, but we do need to get a lot more people online and performing,” said Jlo.
“When we’re looking at performance, the performance is what you get out of your work,” he said.
“The best way to learn is to do the work,” Jlo added.
“There’s no better way to do that than to see it.”
Jlo said the next step is for physicians to conduct research using online platforms to collect data on the quality of care that is delivered to patients.
“If we’re going to do something like that, we’re probably going to have to make a lot of compromises in terms of what happens in terms that we’re able to collect those data,” JLO said.
He said he sees an opportunity to do online studies of a lot broader scope.
“One of the problems that’s been faced by our research community is that we have a very small amount of data available,” he added.
“We have to do things like gather that data on a population that is a very large number of people and a very complicated set of interactions.”JLO said the NIH would like to collaborate with universities and other organizations to collect more data, and to work with private companies to develop tools that allow physicians to analyze their patients’ online performance.
“This technology is going to come, and the thing that we want to do with it is build on what we already have,” Jlow said.
