What is ECWeb?

Already recognized as a leader in providing quality health care, VA has embarked on an ambitious effort to promote and improve ethical practices in health care.

IntegratedEthics is an education and organizational change initiative that seeks to raise the profile of ethics quality within VA - to ensure that ethics quality is valued every bit as much as other organizational imperatives, such as "making the numbers" and "following the rules."

To obtain a better understanding of the IntegratedEthics initiative - including the rationale behind it, as well as the key goals, methods, and tools that have been developed to support it - you may want to take a few moments to review the Ethics Consultation primer (requires Adobe Acrobat) before continuing.

So what is ECWeb? Well, it's a web-based tool that will play an important role in helping achieve the goal of improving ethics quality within VA. ECWeb was designed and developed as part of the IntegratedEthics initiative.

One of its primary purposes is to enable ethics consultants to manage and securely store data about their ethics consultations.

Ethics consultants will only be able to see consultation records from their own facility. The data entry format will reflect sound ethics practices, and will help improve the quality of ethics consultations.

Ethics consultants at each VA facility will use ECWeb to document the ethics consultations they perform. One or more designated evaluators at each facility will gather feedback on completed ethics consultations and document the feedback in the ECWeb database.

All of this data will be stored on a secure server within VA, where - as you'll see in the ECWeb Security topic - it can only be accessed by the appropriate individuals.

Collecting and analyzing data like this is an essential part of any quality improvement effort. Only by systematically analyzing work and comparing it to clearly defined goals can an organization identify its strengths and weaknesses, and formulate strategies for improvement.

As you'll see, ECWeb is more than just a quality improvement tool, though.

It's also a workflow management tool that will - among other things - help ethics consultants use the CASES approach to ethics consultation, and help evaluators to effectively gather feedback about the consultation process from participants.

And it's a knowledge management tool as well. The body of information, best practices, and ethics knowledge that each facility will accumulate in ECWeb will serve as a valuable resource that facility staff can use in addressing future ethical concerns.

ECWeb provides a number of useful tools - including full-text search, data reports, and powerful sorting capabilities - to help you quickly locate the information you need.