Safe and Sound is a collaboration between three groups who are world leaders in their respective fields. The grand challenge of effectively utilising ICT in clinical practice is the ethos of the Oxford University group. Showing how this can be achieved on a large scale using open, peer to peer technologies is the responsibility of Edinburgh University and the role of evaluating exactly what is to be achieved in clinical terms is taken by Imperial Healthcare/NHS Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality.
The University of Oxford
The Oxford group grew out of the Advanced Computation Laboratory of Cancer Research UK (previously ICRF). The ACL was established in 1989 with a commitment to combining basic research in computer science with the development, testing and deployment of medical and other applications. The ACL maintained a “virtuous circle” in which real world problems in medicine challenged theory, theory stimulates development of novel technologies, and the latter are rigorously tested in clinical use. For example, the group’s basic work on non-classical logics and agents provided the foundation for developing the PROforma process specification language and the Tallis application development platform, which have been used to develop many successful decision support, workflow and other applications. The group has published some 300 refereed papers and four books on AI in biomedicine, and in 1996 was awarded the 20th Anniversary gold medal of the European Association of Medical Informatics for its work on PROforma.
In 2002 the group set up OpenClinical, an international information service and portal for accessing technical, clinical and commercial developments in decision support, knowledge management and other advanced technologies in medicine. OpenClinical has grown into a unique and trusted resource, promoting awareness of academic research in these fields and the highest quality, safety and ethical standards in engineering. OpenClinical has achieved a global user base estimated to include 20,000 or more individuals. The Oxford group also has experience in patenting and commercial licencing of is R&D, and in 1999 led to the spin-off of InferMed Ltd from ICRF, which has become a leading provider of PROforma and other software and services to the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and clinical research sectors.
The University of Edinburgh
The School of Informatics is the only university grouping in the UK to have achieved the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 RAE round. With 87.1 research-active staff submitted for assessment, it is the UK's largest research group in this area. The Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications is concerned with the theories of knowledge representation and inference and the engineering of systems to model, automate and support this activity. The research staff undertake a mixture of basic and applied research in these areas.
We have built a framework for knowledge sharing that possesses the features described in our vision statement above: it uses explicit, declarative process models (in the LCC language, described later) to provide the context for knowledge sharing in a peer to peer architecture (thus removing the assumption of a centralised coordination system) and provides mechanisms for discovery, subscription and sharing of these models. LCC has been well received by the multi-agent systems; logic programming; semantic web and artificial intelligence communities (as evidenced by papers at the major international conferences in each area) so it has an unusually broad appeal. It is neutral to the medium of interaction, so solutions developed for (say) a Web service infrastructure apply (with adaptation to a different information carrier) to a Grid infrastructure or any other form of asynchronous communication substrate. In January 2006 began a 4M euro, 3-year EU funded project (OpenKnowledge ) to build a practical peer to peer, open knowledge sharing system working on these principles. This already has produced its first kernel system, available open source. OpenKnowledge is coordinated by Robertson at Edinburgh.
Imperial Healthcare & NHS Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality
In its earlier incarnation as the Clinical Safety Research Unit (CSRU)the CPSSQ was regarded as one of the foremost patient safety research units in the world. Over the years a multi-disciplinary team has been developed consisting of surgeons, physicians and human factors psychologists. The CPSSQ team hasexpertise in failure modes effects analysis, task analysis techniques, questionnaire development, focus group interviews and qualitative research methods. The primary objective of the Centre is to establish innovative inter disciplinary research in the broad areas of patient safety and human factors in medicine. It has recently expanded its programme of research to enhance quality, safety and reliability, having recently become part of one of only two UK NIHR Centres for Patient Safety and Service Quality. It has secured funding from the Smith and Nephew Foundation, the Department of Health, BUPA Foundation, EPSRC and the Health Foundation and most recently the National Institute of Health Research.
University College London and NHS Royal Free Hospital
