Our New Project: Research on Medical Practices
Research on Medical Practices (or ROMP!) is a new topic that Gary and I have been busy working on over the past several weeks. Research on Medical Practices can be utilized when various standards of medical care (all that have been proven to be effective) are compared against each other. This can happen in the clinical setting, and patients can often be randomized to a certain treatment as part of ongoing research to determine which standard of care may be best in a given scenario. Sound confusing? Well it turns out that this type of research is often confusing to explain (and possibly controversial with patients as well). For that reason, researchers at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and The Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children's received a grant from The National Institutes of Health (NIH) to better understand how patients, their surrogates, the general public and Institutional Review Board (IRB) members view the ethical implications of randomization within usual clinical practices. The project organizers were looking for a way to educate the general public about ROMP so that they may get their thoughts and opinions about this type of research. So, we decided to throw our hat in the ring and see if our comic/live-drawing approach would be the best way to tackle the complex concept of ROMP and randomization. You can see our proposal below- http://www.slideshare.net/BoosterShot/research-on-medical-practices-romp-video-and-comics-proposal
Anyhoo, our proposal was eventually chosen- so Gary and I got to work right away! We started writing a script and drawing storyboards for the live drawing video as well as drafts of the companion comics that correspond with each video.
After finishing our storyboards and comic drafts, Gary and I headed to Seattle to meet with the Bioethics folks at Seattle Children's to get feedback and make our final changes before we went into production!
The meetings we had were great and incredibly useful for us. When dealing with such a nuanced topic, it was very helpful to review the visual metaphors and script with the research group in person.
And after this day of collaborative (and very productive) meetings, we were ready to go into production!! So with that, Gary and I headed straight from Seattle to Madison to get started. First we had to make a studio to film our live drawing videos.
So with that, we begin our excellent adventure of making a series of live-drawing videos this week. We're going to be keeping a blog here of our progress, so stay tuned!!
Till next time!
Alex
