EGADSS is an open source tool that is designed to work in conjunction with primary care Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems to provide patient specific point of care reminders in order to aid physicians provide high quality care. EGADSS is designed as a stand alone system that would respond to requests from existing Electronic Medical Records such as Wolf, Med Access, and MedOffIS to provide patient specific clinical guidance based on its internal collection of guidelines. Centralizing guideline management under one tool (EGADSS) permits easier maintenance of the content. EGADSS will focus, initially, on preventive care reminders. The project began May 20, 2004 through a collaboration between members of the UBC Department of Family Practice, UVic's School of Health Information Science and Computer Science Department, CHIi, the National Research Council, and support from Vancouver Coastal Health.

Key Areas of Research

Open Source

The goal of using the Open Source approach is to create a community of developers for building and maintaining an open, and therefore sustainable, clinical decision support sytem. We welcome input from developers of both proprietary and Open Source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, as well as from other interested parties.

Clinical Decision Support

One way to improve quality of care delivery is through the adoption of a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS).  A properly designed CDSS is capable of providing patient specific guidelines at the point of care and reminding clinicians, as needed, of various pertinent activities that can improve care.  Our group is interested in exploring the clinical impact of patient specific point of care reminders delivered to providers in primary care offices through Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems and directly to patients through Patient Health Record (PHR) systems.  We are working with CHIi to explore the impact of the addition of preventive care reminders on primary care as a first step.

Encodable Clinical Guidelines

Within the EGADSS framework we have adopted clinical practice guidelines as media for structured knowledge encoding. Currently we are considering several languages for guideline modeling and execution such as Guideline Interchange Format (GLIF), Arden Syntax, and PROforma.

CDA-based Information Interoperability

“Interoperability by design” is our major goal of implementing Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard. CDA provides a framework for representing various types of clinical documents in a structured manner. EGADSS team has implemented several CDA templates for represening decision support specific data models.

Automated Inference and Reasoning

The Guideline Reasoning Engine is one of the core EGADSS components. It operates on decision algorithms, medical knowledge, and specific patient data in order to generate recommendations and guidance for the clinician. To fulfill this goal we have spun off the OpenCLIPS project.

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