TELEGASTRO aims to gather, organise and encapsulate the state of the art knowledge in several aspects of digestive and abdominal disorders. The model used to arrive at this product is generalisable to other medical domains as a true template. The tuning of the system has been assured via evaluation of national boards, existing groups, and monitored installations. It is designed to secure consensus amongst senior clinicians concerning good clinical practice and criteria by which good clinical practice can be promoted and assessed.
The TELEGASTRO suite of programs cover selected areas of gastroenterology including acute abdominal pain, inflammatory bowel disease, upper gastroenterology bleeding, dyspepsia, jaundice, oesophagitis, and upper gastrointestinal cancer. The programs present consensus views concerning criteria for diagnosis, extent and severity of disease, minimum datasets, definitions of terminology, indicators of performance, and indications for high technology investigation and operation. The programs are available in both MS-DOS and Windows formats and include information sections, data recording sections, and teaching programs based on the consensus views of over 500 experts. The programs are flexible, allow inclusion of local expertise and up-date and permit either quick scanning or detailed browsing.