John Fox*, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Online decision technology Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Sol Principe Room: C - Almudaina Date: 2014-10-09 02:00 PM – 02:45 PM Last modified: 2014-09-03

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The OpenClinical project was established in 2001 to provide an information service and web portal for raising awareness and promoting safe design and use of decision support, workflow management and other knowledge based services in clinical practice (www.openclinical.org). The web site was under continuous development until 2011 when it had about 600 pages of material covering technical, clinical, public policy and many other aspects of the field, with links to data sources, projects, demonstrations and prototypes. The site was widely used for reference and teaching and at peak was receiving more than 350,000 visitors per annum, but the growing interest in clinical decision support and other knowledge-based services and the dramatic growth of the eHealth industry over the last decade has meant that it has become difficult for a small and unfunded organisation to keep it up to date. However, the project has achieved its main objectives and we are now building on the success of the first phase by reconfiguring it in a radically new form.

OpenClinical was seen from the outset as an opportunity to support the formalisation and dissemination of medical knowledge as well as providing a conventional information service. Part of the project, therefore, has been focused on the creation of software tools for building and sharing applications to support quality and safety of patient care. OpenClinical.net was established in 2005 and has been developing steadily since then in a collaboration between Oxford University, University College London and the Royal Free Hospital, supported by Deontics Ltd (www.deontics.com) who are providing the Tallis software for developing and trialling medical applications in any clinical area.

The OpenClinical membership rules will permit anyone to participate who wishes to contribute to the work of the project (such as medical content authors, software developers, project managers, peer reviewers etc). We are seeking partnerships of all kinds with colleagues who share OpenClinical.net’s aspirations and are willing to work within its governance framework (www.openclinical.net/vignette/principles-of-the-openclinical-community.html). Membership of the community will in the first instance be limited to individuals and organisations that have been nominated by existing members, but we hope to lift this restriction when the project is more mature and the project is capable of coping with a larger and wider membership.

The OpenClinical.net application repository Repertoire currently contains 50+ apps of many types and levels of complexity, including clinical demonstrators, tutorial examples and reusable components as well as clinical-strength applications. The full service is expected to launch in 2014, but potential authors or researchers who wish to create and share knowledge of best medical practice are invited to contact us at any time, whether to contribute applications and ideas, or to find collaborators to work on projects or research questions about the safe and ethical use of this new kind of knowledge management.