On a QUESt for a web-based tool promoting knowledge-sharing in medical communities

The paper reports on the design and development of QUESt, a platform that is aimed at enabling lay users to deploy web-based multi-page dynamic questionnaires. The platform requires little effort and no programming skills, as it uses a simple configuration file that can be expressed in an almost unstructured and text-based manner. We have validated the approach and platform in the healthcare domain, where the questionnaires were intended to solicit and collect both structured and unstructured feedback from large communities of practitioners in response to the sharing and dissemination of relevant case studies; more specifically in this paper we use a qualitative research approach, encompassing evaluation questionnaires and a particular kind of focus group, and the incremental prototype-based development that led to the current release of QUESt. The paper also reports on the experimentation of the platform in a real context, involving almost 100 orthopaedics, including the post-use evaluation of the participants. In light of this evaluation, we discuss the specific requirements of openness and flexibility that end-users ask for in order to be autonomous in developing their own tools for knowledge-sharing; in particular, we discuss the role of lightweight tools, like QUESt to support the dissemination and discussion of clinical case reports.