Medical guidelines faster online in the 'onkopedia' portal

Who is the DGHO and what was this project about?

The DGHO Deutsche Gesellschaft für Hämatologie und Medizinische Onkologie e.V. is an association of physicians, scientists and interested parties who specialize in the research, diagnosis and treatment of blood diseases and malignant solid tumors. (Source: DGHO website).

The medical portal solution onkopedia, operated by the DGHO and its Austrian and Swiss sister societies, is the tool for creating and publishing guidelines. Content is presented on this portal in a compact, clear, up-to-date manner that is accessible to everyone.

In the project we are presenting here, the publication workflowautomated as much as possible should be to get the guidelines online faster.

For this purpose, the process of editing and publishing was set up anew.

In addition, the technical prerequisites were to be created so that content from Onkopedia could be fed directly into external third-party systems such as hospital information systems via standardized interfaces.

The DGHO commissioned Andreas Jung with the conversion. In his case study you can read how the project was realized.

The role of c-rex.net DTS

In this scenario, our data conversion service c-rex.net DTS is responsible for converting docx data to XML.

Until the switch to an XML-based workflow in 2014, the process was based on Libre Office. The period from editing to publication sometimes took several days.

By using c-rex.net DTS, this effort could be reduced to a few hours to almost zero.

It was important to keepWord' as the creation tool. The authors work in their familiar environment with their own templates.

c-rex.net DTS converts the XML from this, which represents the data basis for everything else, and generates a standardized Word. This standardized Word is used to revise new versions.

This standardized the entire process on a Word.

In the following overview you can see the entire system architecture.

We point out here the conversion part, which ensures in the background that authors can continue to work in Word as usual and are supported by a sophisticated Word.

DTS is integrated into the editorial process via the API and directly connected through the CMS XML-Director. Conversion to the target formats, validation and metadata indexing are fully automated.

The scenario looks like this in detail:

• authors work with Word as an editor.

• Since 2014, they have been using an advanced Word to create content.

  With the new template, among other things, the document structureautomatically checked for correctness is (validated).

  In addition, the Word enables automatic generation of references and links.

• When a document is ready, c-rex.net DTS takes care of converting the DOCX files to XML.

  Since the c-rex.net DTS is round-tripping capable, content can be converted from DOCX to XML and back as often as required.

  For authors, this means that they can check out and revise content already published on the portal as a Word at any time.

• Finally, c-rex.net DTS generates the HTML for display on the website.

• Automatic metadata indexing running in the background ensures that related topics and documents are linked.

Conclusion: Facilitation of the editorial process, acceleration of publication

The workflow for creating guidelines for the medical portal Onkopedia has been significantly improved with the switch to XML as the data basis, without authors having to leave their familiar Word.

They take care of content creation and approval of guidelines and other documents.

authors and internal editors are supported in many ways. Automatisms handle routine operations such as linking internal references or digital object identifiers (DOI).

Tools are available to the internal editorial team to automatically check the consistency of documents or the function of hyperlinks.

The integration of links to related topics or documents is automatically accessed via metadata.

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