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This project seeks to develop an distributed network infrastructure to support primary care research / practice improvement networks to answer questions from EMR data while keeping that data in the control of the practitioners.
Practice improvement and practice based research both require measurement and the answering of practice relevant questions in primary care to be successful. Electronic Medical Records have the potential to support the rapid answering of reflective questions, however they are often not designed for this. Further, they are not designed to support reflection questioning across groups of practices. Without an infrastructure to support data collection and analysis, considerable effort is required to answer the question. Often this effort is too much and questions go unanswered.
Several networks (QI and research networks) provide an infrastructure to do this by aggregating data. However, many providers want to ensure their data and their patients' data are kept under their control. SCOOP, therefore, seeks a distributed design where the patient data is not aggregated.
This project will develop the tools needed to deploy a network that connects EMR based practices to answer a range of clinically relevant questions. It will be open source and work with other open source components to rapidly build the infrastructure.
The project will leverage clinical data standards. It will not build its own data standards. For testing purposes, the project will work with at least two EMR products.
We are building these tools in an agile fashion. The development process will be question centric, wrapping functionality, features, and hardening the application as we address a range of questions that could be asked in a primary care research network.
For more information, see the project proposal. For clinicians and researchers, we also have a SCOOP Website, which is focused more on the users.
SCOOP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
