'Onco alerts' to support acute oncology services.

The National Chemotherapy Advisory Group report has recommended that all hospitals in the UK with an Emergency Department should establish an acute oncology (AO) service. Acute oncology, when implemented at a clinical network level, presents significant challenges for informatics, including the requirement for 'onco alerts' - automated notification of admission of potential cancer patients, whose diagnosis may not be recorded on the admitting hospital's IT systems. In this short paper we present a case study and describe an approach to supporting the development of AO services with cross-organisational information systems.