Project:
Expert Q&A Forums
Development team:
Scott Murdock, Ken M. Wilson
Project Description:
An important feature of the Johns Hopkins AIDS Service web site
is its Expert Q&A Forum. This forum allows
patients to ask medical questions anonymously and have their questions answered by a team of medical experts, with the responses
categorized and archived in order to provide helpful information for other patients with similar questions.
We custom developed a completely revamped Q&A system that included a number of new features for both the patients who use the site
and the medical experts who answer the questions. Implemented with the Q&A Forum are two sets of site management tools, one set
for the system administrators and one set for the medical experts who answer the questions.
Some of the features include:
Expert Q&A Forum
- Browse recent questions or browse older questions by category
- Perform a keyword search among all questions
- Browse bios of the medical experts who answer the questions
- Ask a new question
- Ask a followup question about any previously-posted answer
- Forward any posted Q&A to an e-mail address
Medical Expert Site Management Tools
(These are used by the experts to answer the questions asked by the user community)
- Publish answers to questions posted by Q&A users
- Redirect a question to another expert for answering
- Correct or update a previously-published answer
- Make "See Also" style references to previous answers in the answer to a question
- Sort questions into the appropriate categories
- Remove outdated/obsolete questions from the archive
Administrator Site Management Tools
(These are used by the webmaster to create new Expert Q&A Forums and to manage existing Forums)
- Maintain a list of experts and assign experts to each Forum, each expert may be assigned to any number of Forums
- Maintain question categories and assign categories to each Forum
- Selector switch to determine whether a Forum is an open forum or requires registration
- Multi-language support: a toggle switch sets a new Q&A Forum to either English or Portuguese
- A new Expert Q&A Forum can be created and running within a matter of minutes
In addition to the AIDS-related Q&A Forums, the site management tools have been used to create similar forums on other topics, such as
Arthritis, Tuberculosis, and
Hepatitis. There are even Portuguese-language
forums answered by medical experts in Brazil.
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