TRANSFoRm · TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH AND PATIENT SAFETY IN EUROPE

TRANSFoRm will develop rigorous, generic methods for the integration of Primary Care clinical and research activities, to support patient safety and clinical research via:1.\tRich capture of clinical data, including symptoms and signs rather than just a single diagnosis. A generic, dynamic interface, integrated with electronic health records (EHR), will facilitate both diagnostic decision support and identification of patients eligible for research, thus enhancing patient safety.2.\tDistributed interoperability of EHR data and other data sources that maintains provenance, confidentiality and security. This will enable large-scale phenotype-genotype association studies and follow up of trials.3.\tSoftware tools and services to enable use of controlled vocabulary and standardised data elements in clinical research. This will enable integration and reuse of clinical data.Why this is important? Whilst diagnostic error is the commonest cause of litigation in Primary Care, EHR systems do not provide for easy collection of the data required for decision support. At the same time, clinical research is becoming uneconomic due to the costs of recruiting and following study participants, tasks that could be supported by the use of data from EHRs.Who will conduct the work? A multi-disciplinary consortium of ICT and clinical researchers from across Europe. These include experts in ontology, integration, distributed systems, security, data mining, user-facing design, evaluation and clinical research domains. Clinical participants include The European Clinical Research Infrastructures Network (where the systems will be deployed), The European General Practice Research Network, and a major Contract Research Organisation.What is the anticipated impact? Improved patient safety by speeding translational research, quicker and more economic recruitment and follow up of RCTs, and enhanced uptake of eHR systems that offer support for clinical care and research.