Act management and clinical guidelines.

Clinical activity has always demanded close co-operation and co-ordination between clinicians and specialties. This applies especially in hospitals and in the future it will apply equally in primary and community care. Co-operation and co-ordination require two things: access to guidelines to control shared, distributed clinical activity, and common access to the patient record. Act management facilitates this by managing the process of care as it passes from one performer to another, enabling each to know at what point in the process (or cycle) they stand, what is expected of them, what is expected of others, and enabling them to access the information that they require. This paper describes act management with reference to guidelines and it is a contribution to the process, presently under way, that is intended to bring the leading examples of act management from the AIM NUCLEUS project and guideline support from the AIM DILEMMA project into close interworking in the same system.