In March 2009, The CAPTURE Project launched a concept mapping exercise as part of its initial engagement activities to obtain feedback from the chronic disease prevention community on the nature, elements and eventual design of the CAPTURE platform.
What we did
Using concept mapping methodology, we asked stakeholders to complete the following statement: “An element of any system supporting the collection and use of practice and policy-based evidence related to chronic disease prevention is…”
305 anonymous contributors provided us with 470 responses through a web-based brainstorming exercise. Their statements were distilled into 87 ideas using the Concept System® proprietary software. Interested participants then sorted these ideas. The final result was a conceptual framework including eight clusters that grouped similar ideas.
What we learned
The concept mapping exercise highlighted a number of important guiding principles:
CAPTURE should be user-driven and support front-line practitioners’ needs in terms of the relevance and practicality of the information it contains.
To ensure widespread uptake, accessibility and user-friendliness are important.
CAPTURE should encapsulate various forms of data to ensure it is comprehensive.
The system’s viability and long-term sustainability should be one of the first challenges addressed.
A particularly interesting challenge for The CAPTURE Project is the notion of servant leadership – striking the right balance between providing strong, focused leadership and cultivating collaboration, coordination and cooperation – to ensure the project understands and accurately responds to the needs of the chronic disease prevention community. To this end, we acknowledge that adaptability and continuous learning should act as foundations for platform’s development and implementation.
What we will do
The CAPTURE Project team will now build upon what it has learned and move forward with developing concrete plans for the platform. Through consultations held with practitioners at the National Collaborating Centers’ Summer Institute 2009 and additional feedback that practitioners will give us during key informant interviews, we will develop a draft framework for CAPTURE to share at a workshop this coming fall.
