Managing Clinical Incidents in General Practice

Contents

Clinical incident in general practice can be potentially harmful, costly and even fatal. Studies in general practice in Australia have shown that over three quarter of these incidents are preventable. We describe in this paper a holistic model which amalgamates three knowledge management methodologies (ontological, rule-based, and causal) and case based reasoning to provide an effective platform for managing clinical incidents in general practice. Clinical incident management includes clinical incident analysis, intervention advisory, incident report & browsing, incident repository maintenance, and incident knowledge maintenance. We demonstrate how each type of knowledge and reasoning mechanism can be built and integrated for clinical incident management. We also present the functional components of our web-based Clinical Incident Management (CIM) prototype that we have designed and implemented based on this synergistic architecture and approach.