elCID in the Journal of Infection
For the past couple of years, Open Health Care has been working in collaboration with UCLH and the Hospital for Tropical Diseases on elCID (the electronic Clinical Infection Database) - an Open Source clinical Digital service for managing inpatients and outpatients with infections.
elCID solves two key clinical problems - first it provides an interface for recording day-to-day clinical care. We’ve developed this interface in close collaboration with clinicians with a strong focus on usability, using user centred design techniques, and frequent iterations, to make sure that we meet the real needs of our users.
Second, elCID captures structured data about clinical activity, and features advanced interrogation and extract capabilities. This enables data driven feedback loops in the design of clinical services, by enabling high quality audits to be conducted much faster than was ever possible before.
Working with some of the academics who’ve been instrumental in developing the project, we recently published an analysis of the early findings from this process in the Journal of Infection.
As the paper outlines:
elCID brings together disparate silos of clinical data collection into a single, rapidly searchable database resource permitting unprecedented interrogation of our clinical practice.
However, the benefits of the system go further, having vastly improved the quality and transparency of communication between the Division’s teams, audits of day-to-day clinical practice are now rapidly and routinely performed using high quality prospectively collected data, and research study data collection can be conducted within the main database, facilitating improved integration of the clinical and academic arms of the Division.
elCID is an Open Source, Open Governance project built on the Open Source OPAL framework. It is available to infection services and comes with full support and customisation from Open Health Care. You can find out more information about the software on the elCID website.
If you’re interested in seeing how elCID might help at your organisation, or if you’d like a copy of the full paper, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at hello@openhealthcare.org.uk