MedRapid--medical community & business intelligence system.
OBJECTIVE
currently, it takes at least 6 months for researchers to communicate their results. This delay is caused (a) by partial lacks of machine support for both representation as well as communication and (b) by media breaks during the communication process.


METHODS
To make an integrated communication between researchers and practitioners possible, a general structure for medical content representation has been set up. The procedure for data entry and quality management has been generalized and implemented in a web-based authoring system.


RESULTS
The MedRapid-system supports the medical experts in entering their knowledge into a database. Here, the level of detail is still below that of current medical guidelines representation. However, the symmetric structure for an area-wide medical knowledge representation is highly retrievable and thus can quickly be communicated into daily routine for the improvement of the treatment quality. In addition, other sources like journal articles and medical guidelines can be references within the MedRapid-system and thus be communicated into daily routine.


CONCLUSIONS
The fundamental system for the representation of medical reference knowledge (from reference works/books) itself is not sufficient for the friction-less communication amongst medical staff. Rather, the process of (a) representing medical knowledge, (b) refereeing the represented knowledge, (c) communicating the represented knowledge, and (d) retrieving the represented knowledge has to be unified. MedRapid will soon support the whole process on one server system.
Institute for Medical Biometry and Informatics, Department of Medical Informatics, University of Heidelberg Im Neuenheimer Feld 400, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
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Finkeissen
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Fuchs
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Jakob
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Wetter
D003132:Commerce; D005858:Germany; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D008490:Medical Informatics; D018511:Systems Integration