Strategies for medical data extraction and presentation part 2: creating a customizable context and user-specific patient reference database.

One of the greatest challenges facing healthcare professionals is the ability to directly and efficiently access relevant data from the patient's healthcare record at the point of care; specific to both the context of the task being performed and the specific needs and preferences of the individual end-user. In radiology practice, the relative inefficiency of imaging data organization and manual workflow requirements serves as an impediment to historical imaging data review. At the same time, clinical data retrieval is even more problematic due to the quality and quantity of data recorded at the time of order entry, along with the relative lack of information system integration. One approach to address these data deficiencies is to create a multi-disciplinary patient referenceable database which consists of high-priority, actionable data within the cumulative patient healthcare record; in which predefined criteria are used to categorize and classify imaging and clinical data in accordance with anatomy, technology, pathology, and time. The population of this referenceable database can be performed through a combination of manual and automated methods, with an additional step of data verification introduced for data quality control. Once created, these referenceable databases can be filtered at the point of care to provide context and user-specific data specific to the task being performed and individual end-user requirements.