SCOOP - The Social Collaboratory for Outcome Oriented Primary Care

Many primary care clinics have transitioned from paper-based record keeping to computer-based Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. This transition provides opportunities for computer-based data analytics in support of practice improvement and more evidence-based clinical research. Unfortunately, the data in primary care EMRs is often not readily accessible to researchers, who often have to overcome significant political, organizational and technical hurdles before gaining access to such data. As a consequence, knowledge discovery and translation has been slow and burdensome in this area. Primary care research networks (PCRN) have been proposed as a way to addressing these limitations. This paper reports on the development of a PCRN in British Columbia, referred to as SCOOP (The Social Collaboratory for Outcome Oriented Primary Care). We describe its technical architecture and draw comparisons to related and previous initiatives.