Adoption of a wiki within a large internal medicine residency program: a 3-year experience

Objective

To describe the creation and evaluate the use of a wiki by medical residents, and to determine if a wiki would be a useful tool for improving the experience, efficiency, and education of housestaff.

Materials and methods

In 2008, a team of medical residents built a wiki containing institutional knowledge and reference information using Microsoft SharePoint. We tracked visit data for 3 years, and performed an audit of page views and updates in the second year. We evaluated the attitudes of medical residents toward the wiki using a survey.

Results

Users accessed the wiki 23 218, 35 094, and 40 545 times in each of three successive academic years from 2008 to 2011. In the year two audit, 85 users made a total of 1082 updates to 176 pages and of these, 91 were new page creations by 17 users. Forty-eight percent of residents edited a page. All housestaff felt the wiki improved their ability to complete tasks, and 90%, 89%, and 57% reported that the wiki improved their experience, efficiency, and education, respectively, when surveyed in academic year 2009–2010.

Discussion

A wiki is a useful and popular tool for organizing administrative and educational content for residents. Housestaff felt strongly that the wiki improved their workflow, but a smaller educational impact was observed. Nearly half of the housestaff edited the wiki, suggesting broad buy-in among the residents.

Conclusion

A wiki is a feasible and useful tool for improving information retrieval for house officers.