Future Developments
This page is an online notepad as a record of ideas which have already occurred to us for possible additions to the site. Recent major changes are listed here.
Since the implementation of the Mollom spam filter, deleting a user appears to delete the entirety of any forum thread they have posted spam in, including all the genuine messages - this is clearly not right and will need to be fixed
A printable version of the questionnaire result page containing a summary of all the answers given can now be generated from the questionnaire result page. This is a little untidy at present but it is functional and can be used as a referral form for testing
A document store for downloadable documents
A professionals forum - for qualified healthcare professionals with a special interest in CTS
An email reminder system - it would be posible for users to set the site to send an email reminder periodically to encourage them to log back in and record progress with treatment. This would be useful particularly for adding to the woefully inadequate evidence base regarding long-term outcomes of treatment, especially non-surgical outcomes. Essentially this would be a self-enrolling observational clinical trial - which has interesting ethical ramifications and would require some debate before implementation - please feel free to post a message in the forums if you have any thoughts. One user has suggested that an autmatd email could go out to forum users when a reply has been made to their posting with a link that would take them straight back to it - probably a very good idea, perhaps with the added subtlety that the user could turn the option on or off for each message they post (perhaps on by default)
At present one or two answers in the questionnaire are not 'forced' - these are supplementary questions about number of years since last worked and number of years since diagnosis of diabetes - we need to amend the questionaire structure so that this data is always collected.
A personalised treatment outcome predictor using the same methods as the diagnostic questionnaire.
Questions checking for the presence of pacemakers/implanted defibrillators, and the use of warfarin should be added to the questionnaire.
In the admin pages we need a link directly from a found patient record to the questionnaire answers for that patient - now implemented
New questions for the dataset - one asking the subject to self classify their occupation as manual/non-manual, one asking about habitual sleeping position - both will be quite difficult to phrase/categorise
Changes to the Canterbury reference numbers - possibly add a checkdigit to try to reduce number copying errors. The check for this would also stop people entering other stuff into this field. We also need to stop people registering twice with the same number - trying to create a second account should lead to a password reminder screen I think - or (if no email address is associated with the account) should send a message to me asking for help!
Admin access to serial severity scores is quite difficult at present, requiring use of the masquerade facility to access the My CTS page
A page could be added for interesting issues raised in the forums so that the discussions do not get buried under lots of routine administrative communications. A good topic at present for example would be breast cancer and CTS. This could be structured as a FAQ list or we could use a page per topic in a subsection, headed by a list.
Search this site does not seem to work at present
The ordering of records in the MyCTS screen is not quite right at present with the original symptom questionnaire sometimes being attached to the latest severity score rather than the first one.
The alternative treatments page is now becoming rather long and unwieldy - it either needs an internal index like the references page and ordering into some kind of alphabetical order or else breaking up into separate pages for each intervention. - Index list created at top of page
Revision date - 12th July 2013
