The Pink Book—Quantifying Demand for Digital Palliative Care References (QI834)

Abstract

•Recognize pinkbook.dfci.org as a free digital resource for palliative care content.•Recognize the Pink Book handbook utility. “The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Brigham and Women's Hospital Pain Management Table and Guidelines” pocket reference is a convenient handbook that palliative care clinicians at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) have maintained for clinicians, learners, housestaff, and fellows rotating through DFCI since 1998. The handbook, also known as the Pink Book, has been mainly distributed in a limited quantity hard copy format with a PDF format electronic copy available through unofficial channels. In May of 2017, we created a free website, pinkbook.dfci.org as the official home of the Pink Book, along with its companion reference books for nausea (Green Book) and pediatric symptoms (Blue Book). We report metrics from pinkbook.dfci.org over the initial three months since its release. To quantify demand of digital palliative care resources, we report the usage metrics of pinkbook.dfci.org over the initial three months of release of the website. We implemented an analytics platform, Angelfish web analytics (analytics.angelfishstats.com/) to pinkbook.dfci.org. We describe usage rates of the website from 5/1/17-7/31/17 via the analytics platform. Since release, pinkbook.dfci.org has had 2,652 unique visitors with 6,662 page views from these visitors. 893 visitors used mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android). The majority of visitors were from the United States (2,002) with California (272), Massachusetts (216), and New York (197) being the top three states using pinkbook.dfci.org. A total of 1,193 Pink Book PDFs were downloaded over the three month time period. The Green Book was downloaded 533 times while the Blue book was downloaded 402 times. Total downloads for all books was 2,128 PDFs. During the first three months of its release, pinkbook.dfci.org saw 2,652 unique visitors, worldwide. Over 80 percent of visitors of pinkbook.dfci.org downloaded one of the reference books on the site. This suggests an ongoing demand for digital palliative care resources.