OPAL: a clinician driven point of care observational data management consortium

A vast amount of important information on the various rheumatic diseases that the rheumatologist treats is available in the medical records derived from the patient consultation. Until recently, it has been difficult to assemble and interpret this data. Moreover, the 'everyday' rheumatologist seeing the 'everyday' patient often does not contribute data to better understanding of 'everyday' clinical issues. We discuss an approach to this problem by describing a blending of a customised electronic medical record with a consortium of like-minded clinicians. We feel that this approach demonstrates the powerful potential for targeted point of care data collection in rheumatology research and patient management.