I’m a big fan of clinical Wikis. They allow clinicians to take control of their own content and present it in the way that they need to see it at the point of care. They are not Intranets. Intranets tend to be out of date because there’s usually just one “Intranet Guy” in the IT dept and gradually updates fall behind. Once people see that the intranet is largely out of date, they start to ignore it, which means a) it gets even more out of date, and b) nobody looks at it anyway.
Following on from last year’s work at Strangeways with file-based non-server ersatz ‘wiki’ solution TiddlyWiki, we were able to show the benefits to senior staff who agreed we should proceed to a full server installation of MediaWiki which allows better UI and document handling as well as a full audit trail of edits. This was done in December 2013 and I transferred all the content from their myriad sources of clinical information into the Wiki, creating a single standard point of reference for all information. The Wiki replaced both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Intranets, both of which were sorely in need of updating and had dozens of broken links. The new Wiki allows a larger number of people to be Editors, meaning that with an engaged workforce in control of it’s own information, the information in the Wiki remains more up to date.
We used Bitnami for our one-click MediaWiki installation, which ran well on a Windows box as server.