08.04.15
Data entry and analysis in the NHS
Source: Rupert Fawdry
While working in the NHS, I found myself, starting 35 years ago, with an unusually powerful interest in the potential of IT to help me in the care of my individual patients.
As a result my many years of experience as a GP, in A&E, and finally as a consultant in Maternity Care and Gynae, and also my personal knowledge of writing detailed computer code, I provided the knowledge currently used in the maternity systems of both CSC and System C.
In the process it became clear to me that the problem of inter-operability would ultimately depend on an open availability of the kind of specialised understanding I had gained. (See our letter in the BMJ on the need for wisdom of crowds not the marketplace).
Having been an ignored advisor to three £0.5m government initiatives, each of which quite wrongly assumed that the complexity of medicine could be frozen into the rigidity of traditional IT methodology, I decided that the only option was to set up my own websites providing open access to the understanding I had gained.
The two results of what I now describe as 'pathological altruism' (my 'hobby' costing me personally over the years well over £50,000 for IT equipment and travel expenses), are
- a) entering ‘Perinatal Data’ virtually anywhere in the world now puts the EEPD in the top 10 of over 3 million hits, the only hit concerned with collecting data rather than analysing the data collected by others www.fawdry.info
- b) my www.wisdam.info website looks at the basic information every person should document about matters of their own health.
But sadly so far there has still been little understanding by those at the top in the UK of the value and need for that kind of altruistic Wikipedia-style approach that I found myself pioneering.
Yet the principles set out in the first page of the EEPD still stand.
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