Do you want to make well-structured electronic guidelines and evidence summaries, without the need of costly programming and development?
The MAGIC authoring and publication platform (MAGICapp) is developed through our research and innovation program.
The platform allows developers to write and publish their guidelines and evidence summaries in a highly structured fashion, using the GRADE methodology, new technology and a host of recent developed frameworks. MAGICapp is a web based collaborative tool that does not require any software installation and allows publication on all devices.
All researchers in MAGIC are practicing physicians devoted to evidence-based medicine and clinical epidemiology. We are also members of the GRADE working group and know from first hand experience that writing a guideline is a complex task filled with hard work, and many struggle with the methodology and the processes around.
We have therefore packed MAGICapp with features to guide you through the process of writing and publishing a guideline. A lot of research and effort has gone into improving the user interface of the platform – both for authors and readers – as we firmly believe good design is not just pretty but that it can greatly improve motivation and understanding.
Through MAGICapp we try to keep true to our promise to ‘make GRADE the irresistible choice’, as it facilitates creation of guidelines that meets standards for trustworthy guidelines while maximizing efficiency and reducing costs for guideline organizations.
MAGICapp is, along with all of the MAGIC initiatives, a totally non-profit initiative. We do not have, nor will we ever have, shareholders, private owners or investors expecting to get a profit. Every part of any funds we ever get, is used towards making your life easier.
How can I start to use MAGICapp?
You can view public guidelines without logging in. If signed up however, you get access to more features and services. Signing up is totally free. When signed up you can create and published evidence summaries. You can also create guidelines in order to explore, teach or learn – but only organizations can publish guidelines.
For your organization to start to develop and publish guidelines you currently need to contact us to set up an Administration account.
How can I collaborate or integrate with MAGICapp?
As improving guideline dissemination is our utmost goal we would be thrilled to befriend, help, integrate with and collaborate with any research group, projects or tool-developers sharing our interests. Do not hesitate to contact us.
Below follows a list of MAGICapp’s most important features and principles
(To see upcoming features, to suggest new or vote up suggested features go to help.magicapp.com )
Facilitated authoring process- using GRADE
We are constantly gaining more knowledge of how good design and intuitive layout can facilitate the production of high quality content. This has been one of our main focus from day one. Whether it’s putting in your references into the reference manager, writing or coding your PICO questions, doing GRADE quality assessment or writing the recommendations, we believe a good design and user interface can be both time saving and increase the quality of the content.
Publishing content- on all platforms and devices
When your content is ready for publishing you can publish it on our platform, taking advantage of our multilayered user interface, mobile applications, internal search and link-out features. When published, the content will be available for users on all platforms and devices.
Content can also be exported as pdf, JSON (data) or Word for the circumstances where you will need that.
In any case the content and it’s versions will always be safe with us.
Your content is yours
The content you produce on it is of course yours, we merely provide you with the platform on which to author and publish it. We would of course be very happy if you decide to share your content with others, so it can be reused for adaptation or to improve the common knowledge repositories of the world, but that decision is totally up to you.
Collaboration – work together in a dynamic platform
Writing a guideline is a collaboration effort, so we made MAGICapp a collaboration platform where admins, authors, technical teams and systematic reviewers can work together on the content. The guideline admin(s) can set the premissions of who have access to what. Everybody in the development team will instantaneously be able to see the changes done by others, and using the activity log you can see who did what and when. The versioning problem you used to have with sending documents around by email is gone.
Everybody in the development team also have access to the milestones and check-list, and so follow progress and upcoming deadlines and events. This way of working turns guideline work into a more dynamic process where different groups can be involved at the same time.
Mobile applications – online and offline
Our publishing platform has an inherent mobile application feature, which makes all content usable on all mobile platforms through mobile browsers. The user interface on mobile is tailored to screen size so it will fit all types of mobile devices. We use the newest offline web-application technology, so ensure your application is always up to date and will contain the newest improvements without the need for any reinstalling. Users can make their own app for mobile devices by following these 3 steps
Well planned data structure – the key to good functionality
From the very start we have put a lot of effort into having a good data structure with proper relationships between the different elements, while adhering to the GRADE methodology. All things have an unique ID which enables flexible relationships between elements, link out to other systems, see a full audit trail and move us into the world of linked data. We have placed all content in the MAGICapp in under these principles, which allows you to link to, use or extract every piece of information as it’s own entity.
Instant view of how your content will look for the end user
We have worked a lot with improving the user-friendliness of what the end user sees. It is important that authors keep their readers in mind while developing their content. We therefor give the authors and admins the continuous possibility to get an instant view of how the developed content will be presented to the end user
A new type of Guideline – EMR integration
We base our integration with electronic medical records (EMRs) on APIs and the guidelines offering structured data to the EMR systems. This will improve the user experience and usability of both guidelines and EMRs, without the dependencies of normal integrations. Once the integration is set up by the EMRs (in any level of complexity they see fit) it can be used for all guidelines and content. This way of doing integration also ensure that content is always up to date without the need for any reinstallation or adjustments.
Having structured content in the recommendations makes the EMR system know more about an activated clinical question and can offer the clinician services around this. The codes and structured content of a recommendation could then be put to use by the EMR system, like using the drug codes to offer one-click placement of drugs in the patients medication chart, or look for all instances of a given condition.
We match patients with recommendations, not guidelines – facilitates use with comorbidities
We look at guidelines as mere containers for recommendations. You should be able to match your patient with recommendations from multiple guidelines.
Patients do not match whole guidelines, they match multiple recommendations from multiple guidelines.
To enable this you need a good data structure where the recommendation and it’s related content could be used as a single element. This becomes even more relevant when we try to manage patients with co-morbidities.
Get automatically produced Decision Aids out of your content
In MAGICapp you’ll get automatic production of decision aids, as all the ideas, findings and results from the SHARE-IT study has been built in.
The decision aids we have developed and researched in MAGIC are meant to facilitate conversations of benefits, harms and values between clinicians and patients, having graphical interfaces of the effect estimates underlaying a recommendation.
The data in the evidence profiles are being reused for the decision aids, something that underpins the point of having a well planned data structure.
Adaptation of existing content- Globalizing evidence, localizing recommendations
We believe a lot of effort could be spared by adaptation of content. If somebody has done a very good job with collecting and summarizing evidence it seems ridiculous to duplicate that effort if developers are willing to share. Although evidence in most instances are global, recommendations often need local adaptation- due to culture, values, resources and availability. Check out our adaptation strategy: SNAP-IT
A list of all the features, with links to more details about each feature.
Content production
Help, GRADE, Process and structure -support
Collaboration
Usability and find-ability of content
More about what an electronic guideline-authoring tool and publication platform really means
Efficient guideline development, updating and dissemination requires that authors can write the individual components of the guideline directly in an electronically structure, with components to facilitate their use in decision support systems in the EMR and links to additional resources such as calculators, decision aids and social media.
The authoring tool should cover all steps in the guideline content development process: Delineation of clinical questions, identification and appraisal of the best current research evidence, integration of key factors when moving from evidence to recommendations, development of recommendations and underlying rationale,
To achieve these goals, guideline content needs to be structured and tagged so that it can be efficiently incorporated into different electronic formats, including EMR systems, web guideline platforms and apps for smartphones/tablets. Modifications in guidelines should lead to automatic alterations in output (e.g., update of web guideline and apps) with a minimum of additional labor for authors. We consider it crucial to harmonize the development of the electronic authoring tool with novel electronic guideline outputs in our research program (eg. top layer guideline format), technology for integration of guidelines in the EMR (PLUGGED-IN) and new methodology for guideline adaptation and updating.
The programming required for developing our tool has therefore been performed in parallel with our ongoing research projects.By applying this strategy we have developed a tool that can help guideline panels around the world develop trustworthy guidelines using the GRADE methodology that are implementable, usable, desirable and aligned with cutting edge technology and research. As we are not just a development team, but foremost researchers and clinicians, we combine our efforts to incorporate developments in technology, evidence-based medicine,health research methodology and clinical practice to ensure our MAGICapp delivers what clinicians and patients need at the point of care.
The results from our work with the MAGIC application is built on and will continue to include research from the DECIDE project. The application we now develop in MAGIC will be aligned with and exchange ideas with the toolkit developed by DECIDE, including GDT, interactive Summary of Finding tables and the Evidence to Recommendation framework. The latter two initiatives are currently being programmed by a team from Epistemonikos.
