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OpenClinicalGrowth in the understanding of many diseases and the increasing complexity of treatments are now so rapid that it is “humanly impossible” for unaided healthcare professionals to consistently deliver patient care with the efficacy, safety and efficiency that modern medical research makes possible. National and international efforts to disseminate up to date knowledge of evidence-based practice (e.g. the international Cochrane collaboration and the NICE clinical guidelines programme for the NHS) are widely seen as key to translating the results of clinical research into clinical practice. However the impacts of such efforts on actual clinician behaviour are “mixed” at best (e.g. Chidgey et al 2008; Fox et al, 2009). Three recent systematic reviews indicate that Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems have considerable promise for helping clinicians use and comply with clinical guidelines to improve quality and safety of patient care (Garg et al 2005; Kawamoto et al 2005; Chaudrhy et al, 2006). Garg et al report that 70% of published trials of clinical decision support applications show significant improvements in clinical decision-making and, if key criteria are met, this rises to more than 95%. It is increasingly accepted worldwide that CDS and other advanced information technologies such as workflow services will become a key tool in future clinical practice.
OpenClinical (www.openclinical.org) was created in 2002 to raise awareness of the benefits of clinical decision support, workflow and other advanced knowledge management technologies for patient care and clinical research. It was established as an open information service and portal for clinicians, technologists, healthcare providers, commercial IT suppliers and others to keep abreast of developments in these fields. The OpenClinical user base is conservatively estimated at 25,000 individuals worldwide and attracts more than 150,000 visitors a year.
A major obstacle to the deployment of advanced knowledge based services in medicine is the absence of practical development platforms, delivery infrastructures, and scalable repositories of machine readable knowledge bases, application services and service components (Greenes, 2007). These will be necessary to carry out the research that is needed to demonstrate clinical value and achieve wide adoption of CDS technology. OpenClinical.net is a software platform and infrastructure for deploying CDS and other services for clinical research into patient care (e.g. formalising medical logic and clinical decisions, modeling and simulating processes of care, and hosting research trials). www.openclinical.net provides access to an experimental suite of tools and services to support research and development on decision support and knowledge management in clinical practice (contact I Chronakis for information). References Chaudrhy et al, Archives of Internal Medicine, 2006 |
