An EHR interface for viewing and accessing patient health events from collaborative sources

Abstract

Physicians must collaborate with a variety of healthcare professionals during the course of their duties. This results in the accumulation of numerous pieces of patient information from a variety of sources that must be consulted in order for physicians to provide comprehensive treatment for their patients. Efficient access to laboratory results, radiology reports, correspondence with other colleagues and the physician's own notes is crucial if effective patient care is to be delivered. This paper describes a web-based user interface prototype which can allow physicians to rapidly access and retrieve data from a number of collaborative sources while at the same time preserving a contextual overview of the abundant number of health events that can occur during a patient's excursion through the healthcare system. Health events originating from a variety of domains, such as laboratories, radiology, pharmacies and other physicians, are temporally arranged on a grid to give a physician a contextual overview of all the health events that have occurred during the course of a patient's treatment. A navigation scheme is then proposed which allows physicians to effortlessly access information within a single source or across multiple sources. This provides physicians with a means of quickly accessing several sections of a patient chart without having to navigate an unwieldy number of menus, pop-up windows or pulldown lists.