The PROCAS project developed an innovative universal tool to enable effective quality control of the medical process and to realise a sensible economical assessment of health care activities. Profiles of Care (PoC) are disease specific and can be used by doctors as a guide in the selection of the most effective strategy to manage each clinical problem. Clinical and medical work have been undertaken in order to build up the necessary data required for the PoC approach, in respect of the 2 clinical domains: cancer and cardiovascular diseases.
PROCAS is mainly a smart order entry (OE) software that implements the PoC approach suggesting potential procedures related to the clinical standardised guidelines. The PoC approach tries to identify and standardise reproducible blocks of problems and working diagnoses for each pathology, and associates them with corresponding objectives and procedures. Furthermore the clinical guideline is split into a series of decisional processes (from the initial problem to the final diagnosis). Each step called health care plan (HCP) contains potential procedures (identified by clinical consensus) and relationships among different HCPs. The PoC software follows the patient generated flow of information and stores data generated by the clinical process. Quality assurance (QA) on the clinical process is performed through the comparison between observed and expected actions (process evaluation) and outcome evaluation.