Heekyong Park

MobileMed: A PDA-Based Mobile Clinical Information System

Patient clinical data are distributed and often fragmented in heterogeneous systems, and therefore the need for information integration is a key to reliable patient care. Once the patient data are orderly integrated and readily available, the problems in accessing the distributed patient clinical data, the well-known difficulties of adopting a mobile health information system, are resolved. This paper proposes a mobile clinical information system (MobileMed), which integrates the distributed and fragmented patient data across heterogeneous sources and makes them accessible through mobile devices. The system consists of four main components: a smart interface, an HL7 message server (HMS), a central clinical database (CCDB), and a web server. The smart interface and the HMS work in concert to generate HL7 messages from the existing legacy systems, which essentially send the patient data in HL7 messages to the CCDB to be stored and maintained. The CCDB and the web server enable the physicians to access the integrated up-to-date patient data. By proposing the smart interface approach, we provide a means for effortless implementation and deployment of such systems. Through a performance study, we show that the HMS is reliable yet fast enough to be able to support efficient clinical data communication

V-model: a new innovative model to chronologically visualize narrative clinical texts

Visualizing narrative medical events into a timeline can have positive effects on clinical environments. However, the characteristics of natural language and medical environments make this representation more difficult. This paper explains the obstacles and suggests a solution called the V-Model. The V-Model is a new innovative time model that was developed to represent chronological narrative events in a medical domain. Forty medical students participated in evaluating this model. The experimental results show the new model successfully solved the modeling requirements and had better usability compared to conventional timeline models. All the participants assessed the new timeline as very useful in effectively understanding a patients history.

Development of CDA authoring tool: CDA studio

This paper describes the CDA authoring tool (CDA studio) which can be used to develop CDA (clinical document architecture) documents in clinical environment. It provides easy-to-use interface for editing CDA templates and connecting legacy information system. In this paper, we describe the architectures and functions of CDA studio and its 3 modules: the designer, the mapper, and the generator. The designer provides the junctions to display tree format of CDA schema and generates a sample CDA document. The main role of mapper is map between the CDA elements and the field of legacy information table. The generator produces CDA documents for local clinical environments by integrating real data from the existing information system.

V-Model: a new perspective for EHR-based phenotyping

BackgroundNarrative resources in electronic health records make clinical phenotyping study difficult to achieve. If a narrative patient history can be represented in a timeline, this would greatly enhance the efficiency of information-based studies. However, current timeline representations have limitations in visualizing narrative events. In this paper, we propose a temporal model named the ‘V-Model’ which visualizes clinical narratives into a timeline.MethodsWe developed the V-Model which models temporal clinical events in v-like graphical structure. It visualizes patient history on a timeline in an intuitive way. For the design, the representation, reasoning, and visualization (readability) aspects were considered. Furthermore, the unique graphical notation helps to find hidden patterns of a specific patient group. For evaluation, we verified our distinctive solutions, and surveyed usability. The experiments were carried out between the V-Model and a conventional timeline model group. Eighty medical students and physicians participated in this evaluation.ResultsThe V-Model was proven to be superior in representing narrative medical events, provide sufficient information for temporal reasoning, and outperform in readability compared to a conventional timeline model. The usability of the V-Model was assessed as positive.ConclusionsThe V-Model successfully resolves visualization issues of clinical documents, and provides better usability compared to a conventional timeline model.

Seamless Real-time Clinical Data Integration for Mobile Clinical Information System

The main obstacles for adopting a mobile health information system are the redundancy of clinical data and the additional workload for implementing the new system. To obtain a seamless communication and to reduce the workload of implementation, an easy and simple implementation strategy is required. We propose a mobile clinical information system (MobileMed) which is specially designed for the easy implementation. The key elements of MobileMed are a smart interface, an HL7 message server, a central clinical database (CCDB), and a web server. The smart interface module transfers the key information to the HL7 message server as new clinical tests data is recorded in the laboratory information system. The HL7 message server generates the HL7 messages and sends them to the CCDB. As a central database the CCDB collects the HL7 messages and presents them to the various mobile devices. Through this study we might conclude that the architecture for the mobile system will be efficient for real-time data communication, and the specially designed interface will be an easy tool for implementing the mobile clinical information system.

Modeling korean clinical records as a simple temporal constraint satisfaction problem

Temporal information is especially crucial in medical text processing. The simple temporal constraint satisfaction problem (STP) has been evaluated as sufficient to represent most English clinical temporal assertions. We aimed to test expressive power of STP in representing Korean clinical documents and to find out any encoding issues dependent on Korean language. This paper shows that STP is sufficient. Some distinctive characteristics were found but they did not affect the encoding work.