Primary care oncology: addressing the challenges

The last decade has seen an emerging clinical discipline known as 'primary care oncology' that describes the involvement of general practitioners (GPs) in preventing, diagnosing, treating and following up patients with cancer. This paper reports the experience of our team in investigating the information required to develop a shared electronic care record system to link GPs and cancer specialists in Wales in order to facilitate information sharing between them in a timely and effective manner. It identifies a potential minimum dataset that can provide the basis for the development of a Welsh primary care cancer dataset. It also addresses the associated challenges to be overcome at implementation, namely information, technical, cultural/organisational and management challenges. This work is a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science at Cardiff University and Velindre NHS Trust, the South East Wales Cancer Centre