Developing an Approach for Aggregating Information From a EHR into a Fully Structured Patient Summary

Providing healthcare professionals with adequate access to well-filled electronic patient records and health-related information contributes to an improvement of the treatment process. Compared to conventional Electronic Medical Records these EHR systems commonly contain more medical artifacts due to their cross institutional, multipurpose use cases. Physicians and health professionals are therefore concerned about information overflow.

Goal of this paper is to elaborate new concepts for the automated aggregation of a fully-structured patient summary document based on information extracted from documents which are published in large-scale EHRs.

The first step was the conduction of semi-structured group interviews with experts and customers. This was followed by a qualitative literature analysis. Consequently technical and medical standards in the field of interoperability were screened.

The result of this paper is the elaboration of an architectural approach to integrate an automatic patient summary creation into well established workflows of large ehealth projects based on standard IHE XDS infrastructures, taking the Austrian ELGA as an example.