ECOLE/GRIP

• Mr. Jean-Louis Renaud-Salis
  

  Institut Bergoni
  Rue de St. Genes 180 F-33076 Bordeaux France	tel: +33 56 33 33 33 fax: +33 56 33 33 30 100610.542@compuserve.com
  url:

The main goal of ECOLE/GRIP is to enable state-of-the-art research findings to be transferred into routine clinical practice. Concentrating on the field of cancer care, the project will develop telematics tools and services to enable national and international collaborative literature reviews and clinical guidelines development. Clinical experts will test and validate these tools and produce high quality, internationally validated literature reviews and hypermedia guidelines databases. Applications will be developed using the latest technologies including the Internet and the World Wide Web to maximise dissemination potential in the form of hypermedia databases accessible either on line or via CD-ROM. Applications will be designed to support collaborative groups in all phases of the cancer knowledge production and dissemination life-cycle from collection of evidence, analysis, review and reporting of critical literature, consensus forming, guidelines development and dissemination.

To maximise uptake of best available knowledge, electronic versions of cancer guidelines will be integrated with clinical workstation technology to enable access to patient data, decision support in patient management, and guidance in collection of clinical data for clinical audit, quality assessment and epidemiological research. This latter work will be undertaken in collaboration with other Health Telematics projects, particularly PROMPT. Applications will be developed to conform with standards in medical terminology, knowledge representation, electronic publishing and network interoperability. Methods, tools, and services will be designed to be generic and so applicable to a number of clinical areas including primary care, in which they will be tested.

ECOLE/GRIP results will include

• an internationally agreed and validated methodology for literature review and guidelines development and publishing;
• validated services and tools for workgroup management and collaborative authoring
• European database (demonstrator) of literature reviews for use by guideline developers, healthcare professionals and healthcare authorities
• a European hypermedia database (demonstrator) of cancer guidelines which can be adapted for local dissemination by national and regional cancer organisations and
• a set of cancer knowledge bases for integration with electronic patient record and decision support systems.

The ECOLE/GRIP consortium comprises five European national cancer organisations with wide experience in collaboratively reviewing cancer literature and developing guidelines; technical organisations experienced in the development of workgroup networking applications, information engineering, pharmaceutical, industrial and publishing companies who will participate in the specification, validation and exploitation of project methods, tools and services. Pilot and demonstration sites will include Euro-wide and national cancer organisation networks, and regional health information networks involving oncologists, general practitioners and home care organisations.

• Increasing the Resources Available to the Medical Professions and Improving Health Service Management
• Telemedicine and New Telematics Services. ECOLE/GRIP is directly supporting EU cancer policies: (i) 1995-1999 action plan to combat cancer, (ii) strategy for research under Europe against cancer.