History and Development

Diabetes Online!!!

A new database called as DARTS is being designed to help both the patients and their health care providers.

Health care has seen in today’s age the biggest advancement in the form of communication and database technologies over more traditional methods of exchanging and keeping updated information about all aspects of health care. But the biggest hurdle was that there were inequities in documenting material as IT projects concentrate on their successes and not on failures caused by inconsistent utilization.

The Diabetes Audit and Research in Tayside Scotland (DARTS) project is attempting to improve diabetes care, but also to ensure that this care provision is equitable. There are many necessary contributing factors to be considered in the provision of equitable care from an IT perspective. These include universal data collection, correlation, dissemination, guideline provision, guideline implementation and others.

In many cases, comprehensive care records are not held on computer. This can be for many reasons, but regardless of the reason, to provide equitable care you must collect data for some patients manually. DARTS utilizes two means - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Targeted Manual Validation (TMV). OCR technology scans paper forms into a computer with a minimum of human intervention. DARTS minimizes this task by identifying data collection holes for a validator to target (TMV). DARTS collects the majority of its data electronically, and crucial to DARTS’ ability to work anywhere is its ability to collect electronic data from almost any source regardless of the unique patient identifier (UPI) scheme(s) in place.

DARTS correlates its data and makes it available in two ways: Paper feedback to the clinics and practices involved, and via the DARTS secure web site. This web site is host not only to patient care data allowing Healthcare Professionals to target care where most needed, but also hosts the regional guidelines for the treatment of patients with diabetes The DARTS model is designed to make as little impact on existing working practices in the first instance as possible. Most systems of the scale of DARTS see themselves as a part of a regional / national information repository. Gaining political acceptance for such a repository is difficult in most cases regardless of the perceived benefits It is expected that diabetes care will improve - the hope is that the DARTS model will prove to be a major contributory factor and that this improvement will be universal.