IT-support of Good Clinical Practice in Primary Health Care

Patient-oriented medical research on disease and care in ambulant  treatments, controlled intervention studies, health services research on work inputs in general medicine, result and health care system research in primary medicine are in need for adequate instruments complying with all scientific demands, especially the rules of Good Clinical Practice.
Research in this area, however, faces many challenges, especially on incentives and financing, coordination requirements, IT infrastructure, patient recruiting and query management.
The approach proposed here consists of the specification, development, application and distribution of a information technological infrastructure adapted to the conditions in primary medicine, which, in the form of a process-oriented information system, aims at the supply of a quality assured creation and execution of multicenter trials, as well as at the overcoming of barriers in general medicine research. Therefore, a web-based open source software for electronic data capture has to be adjusted to the characteristics of research in primary care (recruiting administration, data transfer from medical practice software, query management) and enhanced by an active process support (e-monitoring, reminder functions, bidirectional communication, project management).