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Linking medical research to clinical practice
Health informatics standards are essential to achieve the goals of e-health in Europe. Establishing interoperability between systems and patient information exchange between health care organizations is vital for improving the efficiency and quality of care. This however can also be achieved once the security of clinical data and protection of the privacy of the citizens is ensured.
Once free, secure and confidential flow of information is established, a growing cross border exchange of health information for the care of the individual and for collection of population data for public health purposes and biomedical research will revolutionaries medicine and enable rapid development of personalized medical care and disease prevention. CLEF’s contribution to this programme is multi-fold:
Public Health Informatics |
Health & Biomedical Informatics |
Security & Confidentiality | 
The main challenges facing CLEF
High quality, integrated clinical information is at the intersection of clinical research, evidence-based health care and the clinical application of genetic and genomic research. A coherent clinical information framework is required to meet the needs of patients, their families and carers, clinical professionals and biomedical scientists, health care enterprises and the public at large.
Capture, integration, and presentation of descriptive information is a major barrier to achieving such a framework. Clinical histories, radiology and pathology reports, annotations on genomic and image databases, technical literature and Web based resources all typically originate as text. Often they are dictated and then typed; alternatively they are laboriously coded or annotated manually, usually in incompatible formats that lack rigour and hence cannot be scaled up or aggregated effectively.
We thus face an escalating imbalance between the richness of our ability to collect very large sets of genomic, image, and other technical information, and the poverty of our means to describe the scientific and clinical significance of that information. This same inability to deal effectively with clinical information is a key limitation to our using informatics to support safe, evidence-based healthcare and to gather the information needed to deliver clinical governance and other strategic goals of the NHS.
National IT Programme (NPfIT) (www.npfit.nhs.uk)
The National Programme for IT focuses on changes to IT in the NHS that will improve patient experience. The programme has four particular goals:
† electronic appointment booking (Choose & Book),
† electronic care records service (CRS)
† electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP), and
† fast, reliable underlying IT infrastructure (N3)
Over the next 10 years, the NPfIT will connect over 30,000 GPs in England to almost 300 hospitals and give patients access to their personal health and care information, transforming the way the NHS works. It will help to improve the management of health care records, appointments, prescription, and link up-to-date research into treatments available to patients. It will also support patient choice.
A recent NPfIT document described the NHS vision as:
…”one where we see clinicians accessing individual patient records at a touch of a button and the latest research,, wherever they are. These records contain health improvement, self-care, community and hospital information reflecting an integrated, joined-up NHS focussed on people’s health as well as sickness.
Patients will have access to their online health records. They will create and use their own health space to make decisions about their health and healthcare and ensure accuracy of personal information. With access to better information, patients will be involved fully in decisions – not just about treatment, but also about how to keep healthy and the prevention and management of illness.
We will routinely use mobile devices and computers with ease. An ease that instantaneously integrates patient care records at the bedside with sophisticated decision support software that can alert drug incompatibilities increasing safe treatment. The Care Records Service will support data collection for clinical audit, governance and research so we can amply demonstrate best practice and good outcomes.
Health and social care are joined up and integrated. Repetitive requests for information are a thing of the past as health care professionals can readily access patient details through the CRS. Routing referrals over secure information networks will be standard and hard copy rare. “
CLEF's fit with the National care Record System
The NpfIT Protfolio Model
From: The NPfIT Initial Guidance to Existing System Suppliers
Read the full document at: http://www.npfit.nhs.uk/all_images_and_docs/NPfITsuppliersguide.pdf
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