OpenClinical.net: A platform for creating and sharing knowledge and promoting best practice in healthcare

• Many healthcare organisations create and share ``clinical guidelines'' as standards of care.
• The goal is to improve quality and safety of patient care and reduce waste and costs.
• This documentation is often difficult to use and keep up to date; effect on practice is limited.
• Executable guidelines offer situation- and patient-specific guidance at the point of care.
• OpenClinical provides an end-to-end technology for creating and sharing executable guidelines.

It is well known that medical knowledge is growing so rapidly that it is difficult or impossible for healthcare professionals to keep up. More and more techniques for diagnosing and treating diseases are becoming available, yet new research findings and clinical practices are slow to spread. Information technology and the internet are providing important new ways of disseminating knowledge in healthcare as in many other domains. Knowledge engineering techniques for supporting decision-making and process management are also becoming available, and can be used to support busy clinicians, helping to ensure that their decisions are consistent with current knowledge and clinical procedures are carried out in a timely, efficient and safe way. The OpenClinical.net project is building on these techniques to demonstrate a new paradigm for disseminating knowledge and promoting best practice. The key idea is that much professional expertise can be modelled as computer-interpretable knowledge and used to assist decision-making, workflow management, communication and coordination of care and many other professional tasks. The central goal of OpenClinical.net is to demonstrate how this might be done at scale, through a form of “crowd sourcing”, in order to create and maintain a sharable knowledge base that is available in an open access and open source repository. This paper provides an overview of the project and a summary of progress to date.