Authors:
Ricardo João Cruz-Correia
and
Altamiro Costa-Pereira
Affiliation:
Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto; CINTESIS, Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Portugal
Keyword(s):
Electronic patient records, Data integration, Information use.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Databases and Datawarehousing
;
Health Information Systems
;
Hospital Management Systems
Abstract:
Distinguishing relevant information enables for better user interfaces, as well as better storage management. However, it is hard to distinguish between information really important to clinical care and only occasionally desirable. We aim to answer for how long are clinical documents useful for health professionals in a hospital environment considering its’ content and the context of information request. We have studied the databases of a Virtual Electronic Patient Record that included (1) patient identification and the list of clinical documents integrated, (2) the visualization logs; and (3) a hospital encounters database that includes the list of encounters since 1993. Our results show that some clinical reports are still used after one year regardless of the context in which they were created, although significant differences exist in reports created in distinct encounter types. The half-life of reports by encounter type is 1.7 days for emergency, 3.9 days for inpatient and 27.7
for outpatient encounters. We conclude that the usage of patients past information (data from previous hospital encounters), varied significantly according to the setting of healthcare and content.
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