GPnotebook is a British medical database for
general practitioners (GPs). It is an online
encyclopaedia
An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
of
medicine
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pract ...
that provides an immediate reference resource for
clinician
A clinician is a health care professional typically employed at a skilled nursing facility or clinic. Clinicians work directly with patients rather than in a laboratory or as a researcher. A clinician may diagnose, treat, and otherwise care for pa ...
s worldwide. The database consists of over 30,000 index terms and over two million words of information. GPnotebook is provided online by Oxbridge Solutions Limited
GPnotebook website is primarily designed with the needs of general practitioners (GPs) in mind, and written by a variety of specialists, ranging from paediatrics to accident and emergency.
The original idea for the database began in the canteen of John Radcliffe Hospital in 1990 while James McMorran, a first year Oxford University clinical student, was writing up his medical notes. Instead of writing notes in longhand he wrote his notes in ‘mind maps’ of packets of information linking different concepts and conditions in a two-dimensional representation of clinical knowledge. James discussed with Stewart McMorran (then a medical student at Cambridge University and a talented computer programmer) this way of representing medical knowledge and between them they created the authoring software to produce linking ‘packets’ of information in a database. This first authoring software and database was the origin of what today is GPnotebook. It was, in effect, a medical ‘Wiki’ over 16 years before the first ‘Wiki’!
Initially James used the authoring software alone to capture his own clinical learning. There was interest from other medical students at Oxford and in the end a team of six authors (mainly Oxford medical students) became the founding (and continuing) principal authors for GPnotebook. Among them was Damian Crowther who, in time, took over the role of technical lead for the project. James takes the role of editorial lead for the website. Damian developed the software for the web version of the database which was released on the worldwide web in 2001 as GPnotebook.
GPnotebook is used within consultation by general practitioners and is often used to access information about rare diseases
[Evans WR, Tranter J, Rafi I, Qureshi N (2020)]
How Genomic information is accessed in clinical practice: an electronic survey of UK general practitioners
Journal of Community Genetics.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-020-00457-5
References
External links
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Two Innovative Online Companies Improve Access To Information For Medical Professionals{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110516014251/http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/77441.php , date=2011-05-16
A RCGP article describing the history of GPnotebook
Online databases
British medical websites
Biological databases