Website release widens network appeal
Enhanced website features to boost medtech collaboration
After an intense period of user research, prototyping, and testing, MedIAN is pleased to announce enhanced website features aimed at bringing potential collaborators together and showcasing the opportunities and challenges in medical image analysis today.
With over 150 members from academia, healthcare, and industry (and still growing since first launch 3 months ago), the MedIAN website now lets users post and search announcements, opportunities, and news in the field, and send private messages between members.
The core aim is to bring everyone involved in medical image analysis in the UK together to help form new medtech collaborations.
Funded by the EPSRC, and in collaboration with two NIHR MICs, MedIAN publishes all user-generated posts on Twitter and LinkedIn, giving members a wider audience for their projects, jobs, events, and announcements. This provides a news and information service produced by the network, for the network.
Each post is linked to the user’s MedIAN profile, so if someone sees your post they’ll see your profile, and vice versa. The more you post to the website, the more chance others will have to see if your work and research interests align with theirs – and it is hoped this will spark new conversations between members.
Sign up or log in and explore the new member features.
The new enhanced features
Open to individuals and companies in the UK (and those based overseas with links to UK research), the MedIAN website lets members post job and event opportunities, and share news, opinions, and announcements on the blog.
There’s also the special collaboration call feature where you can reach out to others to help answer a research question or get involved in an existing project.
Once you have signed up and logged in, you can submit a post for publication on the site. Each post gets tagged to your profile. Department and company comms, admin, or HR staff can also sign up to post content with a special admin profile.
Write something on the MedIAN blog
Announce your latest software release or call for papers, tell us how you set up your spin-out, summarise your recent publication, or highlight a clinical need that needs to be addressed.
Call for collaborators
By posting a collaboration call, you’re inviting people with specific skills to get in touch to discuss the potential for collaboration. There are no obligations, no definitions of how to collaborate – it’s just a way to start a conversation.
Posting a collaboration on MedIAN
Publicise events
If you’re organising an event, you can post this here. Either include a link to your existing Eventbrite page, or let people contact you to register. To announce calls for papers, post on the MedIAN blog
MedIAN events list | MedIAN’s upcoming events for 2018
Post jobs
Looking to fill a position? Post your opportunities here – or let your department administrator know they can sign up for an admin account.
Other new features
Refine your search
After you enter your search term, you can filter your results by post type (job/event etc.) and refine them by distance from your selected location.
Department and company communications / administrator accounts
Sign up as an individual, and tick the ‘Admin/Support Staff’ box at the bottom of the form. This creates a profile that won’t feature on the members’ map, but can still post content to the site.
How we got here
Over June and July 2017, we surveyed 33 early-career researchers and 45 senior researchers in the UK on their needs and challenges when engaging in clinical and industrial collaborations, and what they would want from a network like MedIAN.
Some themes to come out were that researchers wanted to know about collaboration, job, and funding opportunities, browse potential collaborators, and have a space to post their jobs, opportunities, news, and events.
Respondents also noted that successful collaborations often had a lot to do with the team dynamic – the complimentary skills, the personalities, the trust in each-other’s work – all of which gives individuals confidence and drive to investment time in the project.
Meeting people, having conversations, and building a rapport was very important to most people we surveyed, so alongside our programme of workshops, conferences, and networking events, the website’s messaging facility lets you get in touch with other members of the network. To respect the niche nature of the network, you’ll only receive messages from verified network members working in medical image analysis.
To address these needs, we have built a site that aims to allow people showcase their skills and interests, and find people with whom they might like to work – those with the specific skills, interests, or experience to fit the project.
You can keep up to date with what’s happening across the network by following our Twitter and LinkedIn pages, and subscribing to email updates.
As the website grows, we actively seek your feedback on your experience, so get in touch to say what improvements you’d like to see. For all comments and enquiries, email contact@median.ac.uk.