20 Years of GPnotebook: From a medical student project to a national resource

摘要

GPnotebook (www.gpnotebook.co.uk) is a computerised reference resource that has been developed over more than two decades. It is a database that now contains over 2 million words of clinical information and over 27 000 index terms: WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF GPNOTEBOOK? 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 'Wiki' over 16 years before the first "Wikil