OpenClinical.net: A Platform for Creating and Sharing Professional Knowledge and Promoting Best Practice

Medical knowledge is growing so rapidly that it is difficult or impossible for healthcare professionals to keep up but the internet is providing powerful new ways of disseminating knowledge in healthcare as in many other domains. Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge engineering techniques are providing many tools to help clinicians and other professionals to ensure that their decisions are consistent with current knowledge and clinical procedures are carried out in a timely, efficient and safe way.

The OpenClinical.net project is building on these ideas to demonstrate a new paradigm for disseminating knowledge and promoting best practice. The key idea is that much professional expertise can be modeled as computer-interpretable models of practice and used to assist decision-making, process management, communication and coordination and many other professional tasks.

The central goal of OpenClinical.net is to demonstrate how this might be done at scale, through a form of ‘‘crowd sourcing’’, and maintained in a shared knowledge base in an open access and open source repository. The talk will give an overview of the project and a summary of progress to date and invite discussion of ethical issues and problems of governance. The focus will be healthcare but the OpenClinical.net model does not appear to be limited to medicine and inputs from other research and professional perspectives are also of great interest.