The long-term goal of this project is to enhance the manner in which physicians access, process and marshal medical information by providing them with an automatically generated, comprehensive, and up-to date summary of the information appearing in a patient record. At the point of patient care, physicians must often rapidly process a potentially overwhelming quantity of information pertaining to a patient. Failure to do so effectively may lead to provision of suboptimal care. Some electronic health record systems provide an automatically produced "cover sheet" geared to help physicians with a broad overview of a given patient, but the information is derived from the structured data fields in the patient record, ignoring the valuable narrative text entered by clinicians over time.
HARVEST gathers information narrative (unstructured) as well as structured parts in the record. We focus on producing a summary for patients with kidney disease, as they often have a complex medical history with numerous conditions, procedures and medications. Providing a holistic, up-to-date summary of their chart would prove valuable to physicians in general and nephrologists in particular.
The following three aims will be carried out: (1) conduct a formative study to determine how physicians prioritize and mentally represent relevant information when reviewing a patient chart; (2) create a set of automated methods to select salient pieces of information in the patient record and organize them into a coherent summary; and (3) evaluate the efficacy, efficiency and physician-user satisfaction associated with the use of the summarizer.
Last Updated: 09/2009
noemie @ dbmi.columbia.edu