Content

CONTENT – A project about documentation, data capture and analysis in general practice.

By Thomas Kühlein

CONTENT as an acronym stands for CONTinous morbidity registration Epidemiologic NeTwork. The project has been funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education and was located at the department of general Practice at the University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany. It stopped in about 2014, but the website is still available at www.content-info.org

In the project two of the many German electronic health records (EHR) were modified to allow for documenting in episodes of care and coded with the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2). In the end, 35 practices contributed to the data pool. Many research articles based on the data were published. Furthermore, the participating physicians could access their own data via the internet and ask predefined but also modifiable and self-designed questions.

CONTENT was also meant as a tool for a bottom up version of clinical governance. As reflective practitioners and professionals, physicians should be able to statistically describe and evaluate their work themselves. The core question in this process is “How do I care for my patients with …?” with a certain health problem to be inserted. Answering this question is easy if documentation has been done in an appropriate electronic way, coded with ICPC-2 and in episodes of care. The former leading researcher of the CONTENT project and general practitioner Thomas Kuehlein together with colleagues described in an article how quality work would be feasible if EHR would be designed in the right way (http://www.davidpublisher.org/Public/uploads/Contribute/5626ecb503b82.pdf ).