Concept-based electronic health records: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Healthcare is a data-rich but information-poor domain. Terabytes of multimedia medical data are being generated on a monthly basis in a typical healthcare organization in order to document patients' health status and care process. Government and health-related organizations are pushing for fully electronic, cross-institution, integrated Electronic Health Records to provide a better, cost effective and more complete access to this data. However, provision of efficient access to the content of such records for timely and decision-enabling information extraction will not be available. Such a capability is essential for providing efficient decision support and objective evidence to clinicians. In addition researchers, medical students, patients, and payers could also benefit from it. We present the idea of concept-based multimedia health records, which aims at organizing the health records at the information level. We will explore the opportunities and possibilities that such an organization will provide, what role the field of multimedia content management could play to materialize this type of health record organization, and what the challenges will be in the quest for realizing the idea.We believe that the field of multimedia can play a very active role in taking healthcare information systems to the next level by facilitating the access to decision-enabling information for different types of users in healthcare. Our goal is to share with the community our thoughts on where the field of multimedia content management research should be focusing its attention to have a fundamental impact on the practice of medicine. Copyright 2006 ACM.