A telematic system for oncology based on electronic health and patient records.

Abstract

The NHS in the UK recognizes six levels of IT adoption in healthcare systems. Most current healthcare systems are at Level 1 (clinical administrative data), with some notable specialized exceptions. The telematic system for oncology is at Level 6 (advanced multimedia and telematics). Oncology is a particularly complicated area, as it draws on most of the other diagnostic systems and also has a number of different treatment regimes, each of which may have their own system. Relevant information is extracted from the underlying systems on a regular basis and stored on a server that can be accessed by various parties. Regarding the electronic health record (EHR), a centralized national directory would need to be in place to show the locations of individual electronic patient records (EPRs). In order to clearly capture and specify the requirements of the telematic system for oncology, it was decided that a framework based on Ariadne, especially designed for describing computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) should be used. The use of such a framework captures the workflow, clearly showing the tasks of each actor within the processes, as well as the resources needed by each actor. The Ariadne framework was developed as part of a European ESPRIT research project (No. 6225) which studied computational notations for representing CSCW. Ariadne can be considered as a notation for defining a multi-agent architecture for supporting articulation work among cooperating actors.