High quality, integrated clinical information is at the intersection of clinical research, evidence-based health care and the clinical application of genetic and genomic research. A coherent clinical information framework is required to meet the needs of patients, their families and carers, clinical professionals and biomedical scientists, health care enterprises and the public at large.

Capture, integration, and presentation of descriptive information is a major barrier to achieving such a framework. Clinical histories, radiology and pathology reports, annotations on genomic and image databases, technical literature and Web based resources all typically originate as text. Often they are dictated and then typed; alternatively they are laboriously coded or annotated manually, usually in incompatible formats that lack rigour and hence cannot be scaled up or aggregated effectively.

We thus face an escalating imbalance between the richness of our ability to collect very large sets of genomic, image, and other technical information, and the poverty of our means to describe the scientific and clinical significance of that information. This same inability to deal effectively with clinical information is a key limitation to our using informatics to support safe, evidence-based healthcare and to gather the information needed to deliver clinical governance and other strategic goals of the NHS.

Introductory Material

CLEF Animation - 9 minute Powerpoint overview of CLEF vision and architecture (1.2 Mb zip)

CLEF Video - brief screencap video of running demo alpha software in summer 2004. Package includes installer for required video CODEC. (5Mb)

CLEF is a research project, funded by the United Kingdom Medical Research Council, that will employ the Grid distributed computing framework to produce a new environment for clinical research.