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SCOOP- The Social Collaboratory for Outcome Oriented Primary care

What problem does SCOOP address?

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.

This project seeks to develop an infrastructure to support networks to answer questions while keeping data in the control of the providers.

What is the goal of this project?

This project supports practitioners and groups of practitioners to engage in reflective practice. it does so by leveraging the use of standardized EMR data across multiple practices while the patient data stays in the control of the practice. A secure network hub can ask questions of the practices with sufficient rigour to support quality improvement and research.

What is the scope of this project?

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 build / adapt and test three components:

• EMR Adaptor that connects and EMR to the Endpoint, converting data as needed to a standardized format
• Endpoint that contains a replicated subset of the EMR data that will be used for analysis and resides under the provider's control. The endpoint will provide a user interface so that the provider can review who would like to ask questions of the data (without data being released) and will handle querying of the data and summarizing answers that are shared with the network.-
• Network Hub that allows question managers to encode questions, distribute them to endpoints, and aggregate responses. The project will leverage data standards and other existing projects and extend these. It will not build its own data standards. For testing purposes, the project will work with 2 EMR products to ensure the EMR adaptor is capable of extending beyond one product.

What development methodology is being used?

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.

Where should a new team member start?

For more information, see the project proposal. For clinicians and researchers, we also have a SCOOP Website, which is focused more on the users.