System to support the early referral of patients with suspected cancer
| developed by |
clinical domains |
keywords |
| Advanced Computation Laboratory, Cancer Research UK, London;
InferMed Ltd., London, 2000-2001.
|
Cancer, primary care
|
Decision support for early referrals |
| status |
access demonstrator |
| Advanced prototype, in clinical use |
ONLINE
at InferMed.com
|
| description |
ERA is an interactive decision support tool
which has been designed to help primary care physicians comply
with the 2-week standard outlined by the UK Department
of Health's Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer.
The guidelines set out criteria for deciding whether to refer
suspected cancer patients for urgent specialist services. ERA includes textual material from the paper guideline (translated into web pages) augmented with an enactable
procedure written in PROforma. This procedure captures the patient history, interprets it, and advises whether or not referral is appropriate under NHS policy.
The ERA application encompasses twelve types of cancer.
The ERA application entry screen.
ERA is being piloted by the UK NHS Information
Authority. ERA has been integrated with the EMIS Practice Management
System prior to implementation within two NHS Trusts (Leicester and
Southampton). The system will be used by around ten GP practices and sixty GPs.
|
| references |
|
J Bury, M Humber, J Fox. Integrating Decision Support with Electronic Referrals.
Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress on Health and Medical Informatics (Medinfo2001), London, UK. September 2-5, 2001
[]
[]
|
"
"
|
|
M Humber, H Butterworth, J Fox, R Thomson.
Medical Decision Support via the Internet: PROforma and Solo Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress on Health and Medical Informatics (Medinfo2001), London, UK. September 2-5, 2001.
[paper - CRUK]
[]
|
"
This paper describes the development and application of an integrated technology to support the authoring of intelligent medical knowledge services, such as decision and guideline support, and disseminate them over the Internet. Decision support and guideline enactment are provided by the PROforma technology which is described in detail elsewhere. Solo is a communications infrastructure that supports the delivery of PROforma services over the Internet using a web browser. The PROforma-Solo technology brings together techniques from knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence with software engineering and the Internet to flexibly support decision making and patient management at the point of care. A variety of clinical applications have been implemented and are briefly described.
"
|
|
Department of Health. Referral guidelines for suspected
cancer. London: DoH, 2000.
[DoH]
|
"The Government White Paper entitled ‘The new NHS – Modern, Dependable’
guaranteed that everyone with suspected cancer will be able to see a specialist
within two weeks of their GP deciding that they need to be seen urgently and
requesting an appointment.
...
The aim of these guidelines is to facilitate appropriate referral between primary and
secondary care for patients whom a GP suspects may have cancer. The guidelines
should help GPs to identify those patients who are most likely to have cancer and
who therefore require urgent assessment by a specialist. Equally it is hoped that
the guidelines will help GPs to identify patients who are unlikely to have cancer
and who may appropriately be observed in a primary care setting or who may
require non-urgent referral to a hospital...
" |
|
| contact |
links |
John Fox
Advanced Computation Laboratory
Cancer Research UK, London |
|
| acknowledgements |
| Advanced Computation Laboratory, CR-UK and InferMed Ltd. |
Entry on OpenClinical: 5 November 2001
Last main update: 8 November 2001; 01 April 2005
|
|
Advanced Computation Laboratory