The Successful Electronic Health Record (S-EHR) Home

Electronic health records (EHR) are also called EPR systems (Electronic Patient Records). Some of the claims about EHR systems are that they are instrumental for improving the health sector, but currently they are cumbersome to use, threaten confidentiality, are expensive, cannot integrate properly, etc.

This project addresses one of these issues: removing the "cumbersomeness". Our vision is to create an EHR system with high usability. It must be easy to get an overview of all data for a patient, easy to record new data, easy for the hospital department to get an overview of all the patients and their needs, etc. Patient data is very complex and has a mixture of numeric data, pictures and short texts (memos). This calls for advanced data visualization methods.

Since much of the work in hospitals is mobile with doctors and nurses moving from place to place, the system must also provide efficient support for mobile devices (PDA's and cell phones).

Furthermore each medical specialty must be able to see and record data in their own way - without breaching compatibility with the rest of the EHR system. Development and continuous improvement of these specialized user interfaces must be possible by local IT staff or third party, without involving the EHR supplier.

We need to design an architecture for advanced data visualization that can work on several platforms, for instance .NET with WPF, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and mobile devices. Although we work on supporting the medical area, we believe that the visualization architecture can be used in many other areas too. See more in the R & D note on Unified Data Visualization.

Competence areas

Creating such a system requires the joint effort of many competences and interests:

medical competences
ability to analyze a complex domain and identify the needs
ability to design a good user interface and invent new visualizations
ability to analyze existing IT architectures
ability to design a high-performance architecture that supports advanced visualization and third party expansion
ability to implement the architecture and user interfaces
ability to communicate and document the system for local IT staff and third party developers

Sub-projects

We can roughly divide the research into two streams:

User interface stream: analyzes the existing work, designs user interfaces and tests them.
Architecture stream: analyzes the architectures, designs new ones and implements them.

Within each stream we can have more than one project, for instance architecture for AX-based parts and architecture for cell phone parts.

The two streams can progress in parallel, but they should provide test grounds for each other. As an example, one test of a proposed architecture is that it can implement the visualizations invented by the user interface stream. This also tests that the user interface design is realistic.

Other information

User interfaces consist of various components (widgets or controls) such as buttons, pictures, text fields and data grids. An advanced visualization might combine simpler ones into a pattern. One example could be a Gantt chart used for project management. It shows activities along a time line. Each activity looks like a simple bar. We can make it more advanced by letting it show different kinds of components for different activities. Anders Petterson, one of my Master students, developed such a Gantt chart, but it cannot be tailored by local IT staff and cannot cooperate with an ERP system. You may try it out on Gantt experiment.

A great source of inspiration is Ben Shneiderman's team at University of Maryland. Look for instance at the LifeLine visualization on: Shneiderman.

The project is funded by DSF (The Danish Strategic Research Council - Det Strategiske Forskningsråd). For further information on the S-EHR project, see the description in the funding application: SEHRproject.pdf.