End-to-End Notifications and Interactivity in Standard Based EHR Networks

One of the main challenges of EHR system is providing information in an adequate and timely manner to its user which can be as well professionals as patients. In both usage scenarios the acceptance and usage of such system benefits from alerting and notification functionality on events. Since this aspect is hardly covered in interoperability and EHR standards the goal of this paper is to identify workflows and extensions to standard based EHR system to provide this functionality. Using requirements engineering technics and a three-tire analysis phase a list of requirements and an architecture based on IHE standards could be identified. In this concept patients, professional and administrators have been identified as main user groups of such systems. Notification events for the user groups could be categorized to the core attribute families Type and Transport Channel. The notifications itself are triggered by events that could be defined. Outlining the workflows that trigger events in the IHE based infrastructure we identified the challenge of differentiating system generated or based events which are also caused by the notification system's operation. This might lead to invalid event triggers and therefore must be discussed in future work.