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Citation
Campos J: Web Site for Closed Claims Project Provides Access and Insight. ASA Newsletter 62(6):10-11, 1998.
Full Text
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 <http://depts.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>.
* Author's Note 7/22/99: This URL will link the reader with the new web server of the ASA Closed Claims Project. The URL printed in the original text has been decommissioned.
Campos J: Web Site for Closed Claims Project Provides Access and Insight. ASA Newsletter 62(6):10-11, 1998, is reprinted with permission of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, 520 N. Northwest Highway, Park Ridge, Illinois 60068-2573