Design and development of an application to extend the diffusion of Cochrane Mexico

Article type
Authors
Campos Castolo EM1, Landa Ramírez E2, Lima Sánchez DN1, Méndez Sánchez L3, Clark Peralta PE3, Fajardo Dolci G4
1Department of Biomedical Informatics, School of Medicine, UNAM
2School of Psycology, UNAM, General Hospital Gea Gonzalez
3Unity of Clinical Epidemiology, Children's Hospital of Mexico “Federico Gómez”, School of Medicine, UNAM
4Dean of School of Medicine, UNAM
Abstract
Introduction: the Cochrane Collaboration (now known as 'Cochrane') was founded in 1993. The Cochrane Library is a database that contains different types of evidence of high quality; it belongs to Cochrane, and is published by Wiley. In Mexico, as part of the program of dissemination and accessibility of Cochrane Mexico, enlargement was made an Application in 2017 by the Department of Biomedical Informatics of the Faculty of Medicine of the UNAM.

Objective: to support Cochrane in the dissemination of the information provided by its users around the world, with portability.

Methodology: this application is available for Android or IOs within application stores. It displays information about Cochrane Mexico, such as news, health articles, an overview of Cochrane in medical practice, and information about the organization. Users can search for results over a range of years, so all the information published by Cochrane is available on mobile devices that have internet access, regardless of the location of the user. The application was released in September 2017. The application is aimed at health professionals. It is a free non-commercial application.

Results: on average there have been 336 downloads for Android and 260 downloads for IOs, mainly from Mexico, but also of countries in South America such as Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, and even from Germany.

Conclusion: the development of applications that improve access to Cochrane can be done globally, and it is necessary significant dissemination of the application to increase the rate of downloads.

Patient or Healthcare consumer involvement: increase the accessibility of health professionals to the latest relevant news on the Cochrane Mexico page to improve the quality of care; a patient version can be made in the future.

Key words: dissemination, accessibility, mobile app, Cochrane, Mexico