By The Learning Healthcare Project.
Please watch the video of Professor John Fox discussing OpenClinical at out workshop in London on 5 March 2015 by clicking on the thumbnail.
OpenClinical was established in 2001 to support clinical knowledge management for translational medicine and evidence based practice and adoption of technologies to improve quality and safety in patient care. As these fields have progressed OpenClinical.net was introduced in 2005 , in collaboration with University College London, Oxford University and Deontics Ltd., with the central aim of creating and maintaining an open access and open source repository of medical knowledge in a machine-readable format. This will enable the sharing of knowledge and best practice and the rapid translation of new research into clinical practice. The key idea is that guidelines can be enhanced to produce a hybrid of human readable machine interpretable knowledge that will help to improve quality, drive improvements in patient care and reduce waste.
It has become increasingly difficult for medical practitioners to keep up to date with the vast amount of medical research being published. Information Technology can provide a means of disseminating knowledge in healthcare. Computers can actively support clinical decision making and treatment planning at the point of care and can provide advice that is specific to individual patients together with the research evidence for this advice. This can help to ensure decisions are consistent with current guidance and knowledge.
OpenClinical.net provides a suite of software that enables authors to create and submit applications for publication. These are checked for consistency and quality before undergoing a specialist peer review and subsequently published applications are made available to the OpenClinical community through the Repertoire open access and open source repository. From here applications can be downloaded and adapted to fit different organisations and local conditions.
OpenClinical can also provide the means for researchers to translate new clinical research findings into clinical practice through feeding back information about outcomes of new practice into research and thus completing the learning cycle for continuous improvement.
Currently OpenClinical content makes use of the PROforma process modelling language and the Tallis suite of software for creating and deploying applications. OpenClinical plan to expand this to be able to support other data standards, workflow and guideline models, ontologies and terminologies.
For further information please visit the OpenClinical website.
Website: http://www.openclinical.net/