Content analysis of abstracts of communications of GP during congresses, a step forward.

Département universitaire de médecine générale. University of Liège. belgium
marc.jamoulle@doct.ulg.ac.be

Context
To succeed to have an accepted communication in a congress is a quite challenging and time consuming process. The gathered knowledge will often remain an ephemeral work as more than 50% of abstracts of Wonca congresses never reach the step of publication. Despite the effort to publish online the abstracts of Wonca Europe congresses, those remain largely useless as they are not indexed. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are often recommended, but in fact they are not convenient to index family doctor’s works.
Methods
Following the seminal idea of the late Henk Lamberts, the author has proposed to index the abstracts of communications of GPs with ICPC while using the letter Q for indexation of non-clinical matters. The opening of the letter Q for coding Wonca 2007 abstracts has given rise to a proposal for a classification called Core Content Classification of General Practice (3CGP/FM). 3CGP encompasses 8 domains and a rag bag. The 8 domains are open in categories and subcategories. Remained dormant during several years the project kind of woke up in Portugal during the 2013 APMGF congress. Two congresses of the French association of teacher (CNGE 2013 & 2014) have been submitted to careful content analysis using the Atlas.ti software and ICPC and 3CGP as coding items.
Results
The analyze of 998 abstracts in Wonca 2007, 125 in APMGF Covilha 2013, 205 CNGE in Clermont 2013 and the ongoing process to code the CNGE Lille Nov. 2014 submitted abstracts has provoked the evolution of 3CGP and demonstrates the interest to combine ICPC and a non-clinical classification for indexing Family doctor’s work. Next phases of the projects will be to link 3CGP to Wonca dictionary definitions, to corresponding MeSH terms if any, and to edit the whole product in Protégé, the semantic web editor. Indeed, semantic knowledge technology is waiting for general practice and will permit indexing congresses automatically or in a helped way, rising to the need of knowledge management for the family medicine of the future.
Discussion
The collaboration of WICC will be asked for further work.