June 1998
Volume 62 |
Number 6
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| Web Site for Closed
Claims Project Provides Access and Insight |
John Campos, M.A.
In the summer of 1995, the American Society of Anesthesiologists
(ASA) Committee on Professional Liability's Closed Claims Project
established its presence on the World Wide Web at <weber.u.washington.edu/~asaccp>.
Using the University of Washington's Web document server, Weber,
the Closed Claims Project seeks to provide anesthesiologists and
the public with an overview of the Project's goals and research.
In the summer of 1997, the Closed Claims Project added
abstracts of all its journal articles to the Web site as well
as the full text of its ASA NEWSLETTER articles (by permission
of ASA).
Members of ASA may request special analyses of ASA Closed
Claims Project data. Instructions on how to request such analyses
are provided on the Web site. ASA members may wish to examine
the articles provided on the Web site in order to formulate research
questions.
Also on the Web site is a description of the adjunct project,
the Pediatric Perioperative Cardiac Arrest (POCA) Registry sponsored
in part by the Committee on Professional Liability. The POCA Registry,
created in 1994, investigates the possible relationship of anesthesia
to cardiac arrests and death in pediatric patients (see page 16).
The public can peruse articles either through the Closed
Claims Project's online bibliography or its series of predesigned
subject categories. In addition, many commercial search engines,
including AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek, AOLFind, Excite and Hotbot,
have indexed our Web site for online searching. Yahoo!, AOLFind
and Excite are used most often to find our site, although links
to our site have sprung up on many organizational and personal
Web sites, such as GASNet™ and ASA's own Web site. GASNet
indexes our articles as they appear on ASA's Web site. Regardless
of how you do your Web browsing, if you are searching for information
on awareness during anesthesia, intraoperative burns or nerve
damage, to name a few areas, you will likely run across one of
the Closed Claims Project's articles.
In terms of access, 16 percent of our browsers have been
from outside the United States, with Austria and Switzerland leading
the pack. In fact, Universität Basel in Switzerland accounts
for most of our academic Web access anywhere in the world.
Interestingly, although the Closed Claims Project has
a distinctive academic edge to its content, many people browse
using commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as America
Online and UUNET. This may be because many organizations do not
have an internal Internet infrastructure in place and instead
depend on independent ISPs for access. In addition, it is quite
possible that many browse our site from home. Considering the
high number of "hits" we receive on the weekends and after 5 p.m.
P.S.T. each day, this seems very likely.
The Closed Claims Project's Web site will continue to
make improvements in coming months. A full-text search capability
will be added. Articles will be cross-referenced with other information
available on the Internet.
Questions and comments about the Closed Claims Project
are always encouraged and should be addressed to Karen Posner,
Ph.D., at <posner@u.washington.edu>.
Technical questions or comments about the Web site should be addressed
to the author at <asaccp@u.washington.edu>.
John Campos, M.A., is Systems Analyst/Programmer
for the Department of Anesthesiology, University of Washington
School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington.
E-mail the author
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