Knowledge Publishing
Effective dissemination of clinical research findings is key to continuing improvement in modern medical services. If clinicians cannot keep abreast of developments, they cannot deliver the best possible care, and cannot feed-back their experience into new research. However, it is already impossible for clinicians to cope with the vast amount of medical research being published, a situation which can only get worse as the science base continues to grow inexorably.
The medical informatics community has developed a way of addressing the dissemination problem. In this solution, computers actively support clinical decision-making and treatment planning at the point of care, providing advice that is specific to individual patients together with the rationale and research evidence for this advice. A convincing body of published data shows that decision support systems improve practice and contribute to patient safety and improved use of resources. The primary questions now are not “do they work?” but rather, can we deliver the right services at the right time where they are needed? And can we feed-back clinical experience into research on better practice and better treatments?
The OpenClinical.net vision is a comprehensive collection of knowledge-based clinical services, covering a wide range of conditions, and easily accessible wherever and whenever needed. This vision requires a technical and organisational infrastructure to bring it to reality and must include
- Standards for modeling clinical processes and formally representing knowledge of best clinical practice and the research on which it is grounded;
- Methods and tools for capturing this knowledge in machine interpretable form;
- Making this content publicly available (as part of the semantic web);
- A support infrastructure for the community of specialists who collaborate on the maintenance of this public resource; and
- Practical publishing and business models for the sustainable development of the content.