Aastha Madaan

Quasi-Relational Query Language Interface for Persistent Standardized EHRs: Using NoSQL Databases

Interoperability of health data for information exhange is an area of growing concern. Various new standards such as CEN 13606, HL7 and OpenEHR have been proposed. The OpenEHR standard provides a Standardized Electronic Health Records (EHRs) schema using dual-level modelling for information exchange. The complex structured EHRs and the archetypes form the domain knowledge of the model. It gives rise to the issue of efficient and scalable persistence mechanism for these standardized EHRs. Further, it is desirable to support in-depth query-ability on them. The standardized EHRs database can support a wide range of user queries. In this paper, a persistence mechanism using a NoSQL database for storing the standardized EHRs has been proposed. Further, a high-level QBE-like AQBE (Archetype based Query-By-Example) has been evolved for the EHRs data repository.

Information interchange services for electronic health record databases

Healthcare information is complex and distributed in nature. Patient care and a health condition commonly require collaboration between several clinicians. Such an integration of information is important to retrieve patient history, for knowledge sharing and to formulate queries. Large scale adoption of electronic healthcare applications requires semantic interoperability because patients have become mobile, treatment and healthcare providers have increased, and also, have become more specialised. Similar to the web, information retrieval is key feature of these end-user systems. The paper analyses the role of semantic interoperability in various cross-organisational business processes in healthcare domain. The system modelling approach has been analysed with a view of supporting system-to-system and user-system interactions. The paper presents a comparison of the existing information and querying methods and studies their applicability to the dual-level electronic health records (EHRs) systems. It further discusses the best approach to build a user-friendly querying interface for these systems.

Discovery of Patterns to Improve Usability of Electronic Health Record Systems

A majority of research efforts in the domain of Electronic Health Records concentrate on standardization and related issues. The earlier forms of medical records did not permit a high level of exchange, interoperability or extensive search and querying. Recent research has focused on the development of open standards for life-time long health record archives for individual patients. This facilitates the extensive use of data mining and querying techniques for the analysis. These efforts can increase the depth and the extent of the utilization of patient data. For example, association analysis can be used to identify common features among disparate patients to check whether diagnoses or procedures are effective. Pattern discovery techniques can also be used to create the census reports and generate a meaningful visualization of summary data at hospitals. For handling the large volume of data, there is a need to focus on improving the usability. The current study proposes a model for the development of EHR support systems. It aims to capture the health workers needs in a scientific way, on a continuous basis. The proposal has been evaluated for the accuracy of knowledge discovery to improve the usability.

Domain specific multistage query language for medical document repositories

Vast amount of medical information is increasingly available on the Web. As a result, seeking medical information through queries is gaining importance in the medical domain. The existing keyword-based search engines such as Google, Yahoo fail to suffice the needs of the health-care workers (who are well-versed with the domain knowledge required for querying) using these they often face results which are irrelevant and not useful for their tasks. In this paper, we present the need and the challenges for a user-level, domain-specific query language for the specialized document repositories of the medical domain. This topic has not been sufficiently addressed by the existing approaches including SQL-like query languages or general-purpose keyword-based search engines and document-level indexing based search. We aim to bridge the gap between information needs of the skilled/semi-skilled domain users and the query capability provided by the query language. Overcoming such a challenge can facilitate effective use of large volume of information on the Web (and in the electronic health records (EHRs)repositories).

Handling Domain Specific Document Repositories for Application of Query Languages

Domain specific information is increasingly available on the Web in form of document repositories. In specialized domains such as agriculture, bio-medical sciences and health-care, this information is required by various domain experts. Health-care experts such as researchers and practitioners require it during health-care delivery and for educational purposes. These users differ from the Web users and database users. Most of the existing document repositories on the Web have alphabetical and keyword based searches. These are not sufficient for the expert users with precise and complex queries, who require in-depth results within time constraints. Their information needs can be supported by providing user-level schema. Such a schema can support database-style high-level query languages over these repositories. Seeking specialized domain-specific information through queries is gaining importance. In this paper, a model for on-line document repositories is proposed. Queries can be performed with in-depth results. The model can be replicated to similarly structured document repositories in any given domain.

Usability Measures for Large Scale Adoption of the Standardized Electronic Health Record Databases

With the adoption of Standardized Electronic Health Records (EHRs) databases, recent research studies consider standardization and interoperability. At the same time the need for querying (the archival data) is becoming important. The complex and dynamic nature of these databases give rise to several usability challenges. This study aims to reduce the gap between the designed application flow and user work-flows (anticipated by them) within the system. Moreover, in the case of standardized EHRs databases, there is a need to reduce the dependency on postrelease user-feedbacks and surveys. This will facilitate the task of system redesign (and re-engineering). We assume that socio-technical features of the users and their usage-patterns over the standardized EHRs databases are correlated. Therefore, we propose the application of user-centric design and automated usability support for the standardized EHRs databases. It provides an insight for improving the system on a continuous basis.

Databases in Networked Information Systems

Data Exploration in Large Area Time-Domain Sky Surveys: Current Practice and Future Needs