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Background

The extraordinary developments that are occurring in computing, communications and medical technologies are now making possible long-foreseen advances in clinical care.  The convergence of informatics and medical research along with the ongoing modernisation of clinical information management have opened the way for on-line integration of knowledge gathered in clinical practice and associated research areas, to improve delivery of medical and social care beyond all recognition.

A coherent clinical information framework is a must for the integration of clinical research, evidence-based health care and the clinical application of genetic and genomic research.    But capture and integration of information into such a framework is not a straightforward task;  clinical histories referrals and pathology reports typically originate as text and are often laboriously coded or annotated manually and hence cannot be scaled up or aggregated effectively.

We thus face an escalating imbalance between the richness of our ability to collect diagnostic, genomic, pathology data and other technical information on one hand, and the poverty of our means to interlink and manage the scientific and clinical significance of that information.  This is a key limitation to supporting safe, evidence-based and personalised healthcare and improve the clinical governance in healthcare.