Informatics in Primary Care (BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT)
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Paperless practices: a report from a research network
Get PDFThe availability and use of clinical information and communication technologies vary markedly between practices.
Practices do not inevitably become paperless after a certain number of years of computerisation.Most sampled practices wish to embrace information and communication technologies.There is no set definition of a 'paperless' practice. Practices with varying degrees of computerisation define themselves as being paperless.Understanding between clinicians and managers on the in-house use of paper notes and electronic data gathering can and should be improved
Identification of the critical success factors involved in the implementation of clinical governance arrangements within primary care
Get PDFThe study explores the theoretical grounding for clinical governance development as a quality improvement activity and an understanding and awareness of interactions between culture, power and leadership within primary care. The deepest and most difficult elements of culture to change are basic assumptions - 'the way we do things round here'. The study also explores the government commendation to adopt the EFQM Excellence Model as a framework for clinical governance. This research is based on a longitudinal study across two primary care groups, exploring the nature and origin of people's viewpoints, the reasons for them and subsequent consequences in respect to implementing clinical governance arrangements within primary care
Concepts underlying continuity of care - the system of concepts described in ENV 13940a
Get PDFIn 1998, the Technical Committee 'Health Informatics' (TC 251) of CEN (European Committee for Standardisation) set up a specific project team to address aspects of sharing patient-related information needed in the process of care, in order to support continuity of care, giving way to a European pre-standard, numbered ENV 13940. The authors were both members of that project team. The system of concepts and the terms defined in this European pre-standard are designed to support the management of healthcare-related information over time, and the delivery of relevant health care by different agents, encompassing primary care professionals and teams, healthcare funding organisations, managers, patients, secondary and tertiary healthcare providers, and community care teams. Beyond the terms used in the standard, which have no actual value outside the framework of the document itself, the goal is to establish a common conceptual framework for continuity of care across national, cultural and professional barriers. It is neither to define how the processes should be performed in a particular healthcare framework, nor to have any regulatory impact on the actual delivery of care. The European pre-standard does not address other aspects of health care, such as security, the specific management of professional acts and their life cycle, terminology and classification, nor the financing mechanism for healthcare delivery
Personalised Medical Reference to General Practice Notebook (GPnotebook) - an evolutionary tale
Get PDFIn 1992, a group of medical students and a UK general practitioner were awarded the John Perry Prize for an MS-DOS-based flexible, dynamic, updateable and structured computerised medical reference system. At the time of the award the reference system contained over 4000 index terms and was designed to provide an easy-to-retrieve synopsis of the whole of clinical medicine.
What has happened to this resource now? This brief paper outlines how the developers of the reference resource have improved on the design and content of the medical database. Now the reference resource is an Internet-based resource called General Practice Notebook (www.gpnotebook.co.uk) and is currently attracting 5000 to 9000 page views per day and containing over 30 000 index terms in a complex web structure of over 60 000 links. This paper describes the evolutionary process that has occurred over the last decade
The Role of Medical Informatics in Primary Care Education
No full textThis paper investigates the ability of a group of Primary Care professionals to acquire appropriate document retrieval skills, so that they can apply evidence based health care techniques to their various Primary Care roles. The participants, most of whom had little prior experience of the Internet, were enrolled on a two-year part-time Postgraduate Diploma / MSc in Primary Care. As part of the course, they took a compulsory 12-week module in Medical Informatics. A specific task was set: to find appropriate information on Meningococcal Meningitis and Public Health, by using National Library of Medicine's PUBMED bibliographic retrieval system and other unspecified Internet sources. A supplementary piece of coursework required the group to become information providers by providing tutorials on the world wide web. Analysis of the reports showed that the participants were able to learn and use the information tools successfully and that appropriate skills can be transferred in a short time. Overall nine were positive as to the benefits of the evidence-based approach contributing to local health care, with nine expressing mixed views and two having more negative opinions