Concept

Many organisations publish clinical guidelines, care quality standards and other kinds of guidance for healthcare professionals. However busy clinicians frequently struggle to keep up with new research and policy, and there is little feedback on guideline use and impact for authors and provider organisations.

However the usability of text, flowcharts and other guidelines can be dramatically enhanced using our methods and tools to build executable models of best practice and provide patient-specific alerts, recommendations for care, and “smart” pathways. These “publets” provide explanations and background evidence on demand, and can capture patient information for clinical audit, data mining and machine learning.

OpenClinical empowers clinicians, researchers and others to develop executable models for their own specialties and settings themselves, and submit them for review and publication in much the same way that they submit papers to traditional research journals. Publets can be validated against real cases before submission, and peer reviewed by independent experts before open access and open source publication on the OpenClinical repository.

Members of the OpenClinical community in other institutions, countries or specialties can enact and critique publets on-line and download and adapt them to meet local requirements.

Resources