One of the challenges of medical research and development, training, and clinical practice is to communicate and problem-solve across a wide spectrum of disciplines and to translate those solutions to patient care.  To meet this challenge, CIMIT endeavors to provide an “honest broker”environment at the intersection of academia, government and industry, one aspect of which is the weekly CIMIT Forum.

The goal of the CIMIT Forum is to promote the exchange of ideas and information between these diverse communities, and to provide an arena where interdisciplinary discussion can lead to breakthroughs in biomedical engineering and ultimately patient care.  Dialogue is an important part of opening doors for education and collaboration.  The audience is a diverse group of practitioners and researchers, including clinicians, engineers, educators, scientists, and administrators.

The hypothesis of the CIMIT Convening Project is that we can develop an “experimental design” for convening that stimulates and allows speakers, moderators and audience to think differently about an issue or topic.

The goal is to create an environment where participants expect to be interactive and challenged (agitated).  Expectation for change will be the underlying principle that informs the process. There will be a focus on stimulating questions and discussion rather than “canned talks.”   

Implementation of this environment will require the development of systems to provide:

 

• Background preparation (including demographics of the audience, background on the topic and speaker buy-in)
• Moderator training
• Just-in-time presentation of data (including topic inquiries, web-based)
• Real-time audience feedback to speaker via moderator (including understanding, questions, challenges, etc.)
• Post session evaluation and assessment of the experiment (impact of the session and the process)

 

Implications: By exploiting new forms of networking, decision support and informatics we hope to build a framework for measuring and increasing the interaction and longevity of the effect of the Forum and to apply our research to develop new methods of convening.