Healthy Communities
Online Homes for Scientific and Medical Advancement
Agaric builds tools for medical and scientific communities to advance their work, enhance collaboration, and improve outcomes.
Agaric builds tools for medical and scientific communities to advance their work, enhance collaboration, and improve outcomes. And we've been doing this—helping healthy discussion about science and medicine flourish online—since 2008.
Reusable platforms for advanced online collaboration
The Collaboratory
The National Institute for Children's Health Quality partnered with Agaric to build the Collaboratory—a platform designed specifically to help healthcare improvement teams collaborate, innovate, and make change. During this partnership, begun in 2015, Agaric built a collaborative analytics tool that allows healthcare quality teams to visualize, compare, and benchmark data, identify opportunities for improvement, and celebrate their successes. We were proud to be NICHQ's 2020 partners in making the most of the digital health revolution.
Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)
In 2015, we began contributing to PECE, an open source digital platform that supports multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research. PECE is built as a Drupal distribution that can be improved and extended like any other Drupal project. Agaric's contributions include building an API integration between PECE's bibliographic citation capabilities and Zotero's open source reference management and collaborative bibliography tools.
We have been brought back for a larger role to realize the full upgrade of this distribution and platform to Drupal 10.
Partners In Health Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Network and EndTB.org
Beginning in 2010, Agaric took over the development of the DRTB Network platform for Partners In Health, the famed international nonprofit public health organization, and the TB Care II initiative. The core of this work was connecting practitioners in the field with experts through a natural yet structured response process complete with careful editorial review. This crucial work lives on with endTB.org, a partnership between Partners In Health, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Interactive Research & Development. All of this work for PIH is in Drupal.
Science Collaboration Framework
Agaric was the lead developer for the Science Collaboration Framework, a project of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing. Working with researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, we built a reusable platform for collaboration and communication in biomedical research, enriching the contributions of scientists and the biomedical online community with semantic data, highlighting advanced, structured relationships between contributed resources, and facilitating structured community discourse around biomedical research. We even earned a writeup in a scientific journal for our work!
As part of SCF, Agaric led the work of building the website for an online community of Parkinson's disease researchers and research investors, on the Science Collaboration Framework, for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.
