SocioWorks: Integrated Web Platform for Applications of Social Network Analysis

描述（由申请人提供）：这个为期三年的小企业创新研究（SBIR）竞争第二阶段更新项目的目标，题为“社会工作：“一个用于应用社会网络分析的Web工具集产品”是为社会网络方法及其应用创建一个技术上和组织上可扩展的Web应用程序工具集，以改善健康和生产力-集成了个体患者，医疗保健提供者，管理员和公共卫生官员的分析单元。这款名为“社会工作”的企业强大产品旨在满足市场对应用社会网络分析（SNA）解决健康领域问题和产生新知识的新需求。在医院和其他卫生保健系统中，社会工作将被设计成能够和促进观察、理解、使用和改变基于关系的组织知识和流程。它将支持基于社会网络的临床和公共卫生干预研究和项目，它将成为患者和家庭更好地了解自己和他们所处的社会结构的工具。社会工作将对社区有价值，例如，帮助家庭适应照顾亲属的需要，并将相关研究和干预扩大到政策层面，以支持这种照顾。本项目旨在开发和整合工具，以利用和扩展对同伴、家庭、团队、组织和其他社会结构如何影响健康过程和结果并成为其组成部分的理解，并支持科学指导的变革。虽然这个项目将侧重于发展社会工程，以应用于老龄化问题，但它在所有健康领域的效用将同样有希望。在过去几年中，网络分析在健康研究的一些分支中得到了扩展，并在一段时间内被认为在老龄化研究中很重要。因此，网络研究对干预的效用正变得越来越清晰。不同级别的数据（例如，个人、提供者、医院等机构和公共卫生系统/管理）可以在拟议的社会工作软件基础设施中收集并链接在一起。正如这个基于网络的软件所建议的那样，干预措施不仅在其所针对的社会组织层面起作用，而且还可以纳入其他层面的干预措施，并与社会组织各个层面的研究和分析相结合。综合网络分析将帮助任何层次的人确定哪种社会网络类型或特征与哪种健康行为和结果相关联，并为制定具体方法提供基础，以解决与老龄化健康方面有关的社会限制和机会。通过赋予用户撰写和管理他们的项目、协议、程序、评估项目和数据的重要能力，社会工作将促进在不同环境和多个站点中使用社会网络方法，以满足他们的特定需求。社会工作将提供基于协议的任务调度和跟踪功能，用于社会网络研究项目和程序化应用，如医院的病人安全和质量改进项目。sociworks将为多站点研究协作、基于规则的研究信息和数据集共享以及安全管理提供工具。它将支持使用标准方法与其他系统的互操作性和集成，并将包括标准格式的数据导入和导出。底层技术将是可靠和可伸缩的，并且使用计算密集型算法的客户机将能够使用来自应用服务器的计算资源。作为一个纯粹的基于web的系统，socialworks将提供作为托管应用程序的完整功能，但客户可以选择在自己的服务器上部署系统

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this three-year Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Competing Phase II Renewal project, titled "SocioWorks: A Web Toolset Product for Applied Social Network Analysis" is to create a technologically and organizationally scalable web application toolset for social network methods and their application to improving health and productivity - integrated across the units of analysis of individual patients, health care providers, administrators, and public health officials. This enterprise robust product, named "SocioWorks"", is intended to meet emerging needs in markets for applying Social Network Analysis (SNA) to solve problems and generate new knowledge in the health domain. SocioWorks will be designed to enable and facilitate observing, understanding, working with, and changing relationship-based organizational knowledge and processes in hospitals and other health care systems. It will support social network-based clinical and public health intervention research and programs, and it will serve as a tool for patients and families to better perceive themselves and the social structures they are embedded within. SocioWorks will have value to communities, for example to help families adjust to caregiving needs for a relative and to scale related research and intervention up to the policy level to support such caregiving. This project seeks to develop and integrate tools to take advantage of, and extend, understandings of how peer, family, team, organizational, and other social structures influence and are part of health processes and outcomes, and, to support scientifically guided change. While this project will focus on developing SocioWorks for applying to aging issues, the utility in all realms of health will be equally promising. Network analysis has expanded in some branches of health research in the past several years, and has been recognized in aging research as important for some time. As such, the utility of network studies for intervention is becoming clearer. Different levels of data (i.e., individuals, providers, institutions like hospitals, and public health systems/management) can be gathered as well as linked together in the proposed SocioWorks software infrastructure. As proposed for this web-based software, interventions will work not only at the level of social organization at which they are directed, but can also be incorporated into interventions at other levels as well as integrated with research and analysis across the various levels of social organization. Integrated network analysis would help people at any of the levels identify which social network types or features are associated with which kinds of health behaviors and outcomes, plus provide the basis for developing specific ways in which to address social constraints and opportunities related to health aspects of aging. SocioWorks will facilitate using social network approaches in diverse settings and multiple sites by giving users significant capabilities to author and manage their projects, protocols, procedures, assessment items, and data to meet their specific needs. SocioWorks will provide protocol-based task scheduling and tracking functionality for social network research projects and programmatic applications, such as Patient Safety and Quality Improvement programs in hospitals. SocioWorks will provide tools for multi-site research collaboration, rule-based sharing of study information and data sets, and security management. It will support interoperability and integration with other systems using standard methods, and will include data import and export in standard formats. The underlying technologies will be reliable and scalable, and clients using computation-intensive algorithms will be able to use computational resources from the application servers. As a pure web-based system, SocioWorks will offer full functionality as a hosted application, but clients will have options for deploying the system on their own servers PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project titled "SocioWorks: A Web Toolset Product for Applied Social Network Analysis" will create a highly innovative web toolset for social network methods and their application to improving health and productivity. This enterprise robust product, named "SocioWorks"", is intended to meet emerging needs in markets for applying Social Network Analysis (SNA) to solve problems and generate new knowledge in the health domain. SocioWorks will be designed to enable and facilitate observing, understanding, working with, and changing relationship-based organizational knowledge and processes in hospitals and other health care systems. SocioWorks will facilitate using social network approaches in diverse settings and multiple sites by giving users significant capabilities to author and manage their projects, protocols, procedures, assessment items, and data to meet their specific needs. It will be architected to support ongoing change and evolution in response to new user goals, needs, problems, and requirements, providing a deep level of sustainable innovation.