Computerised searching of GP records to help identify patients who might benefit from palliative care, irrespective of diagnosis. These work streams aim to develop and test a method of searching primary care records in routine clinical practice as a tool to improve patient identification for a palliative care approach. The first project, now successfully conducted, was able to identify 0.6% to 1.6% of patients in each practice who were not already on the palliative care register with an agreement rate of 30%-60% among GPs. The second project, started in February 2015, aims to refine the search and integrate it with pre-existing medical software so that it can be interacted with by GPs during a consultation or as part of a multi-disciplinary team meeting. An innovative year-long trial is planned in up to 10 practices drawing on methods developed for software ethnography in order to test how the search can best support current practices. Funders Marie Curie Cancer Care, Edinburgh and Lothians Health Foundation Research team Bruce Mason, Kirsty Boyd, John Steyn and Scott Murray Read more Developing a computerised search to help UK General Practices identify more patients for palliative care planning: a feasibility study BMC Family Practice 2015 16:99 This article was published on 2024-09-24
