A Smart System to Create Electronic Medical Encounter Records

A scrub nurse documents the perioperative process during a surgery. Accuracy and easy availability of this record is essential to provide improved health care to patients. The process of documentation is prone to human errors. Several systems have been developed that allow physicians to create an electronic record to document the details of a patient visit. Most of these systems however, depend on the nursing staff to make entries into the record. The aim of this research is to build an automated system to create an electronic medical encounter record, in real time, using physiological data available from various medical instruments in an Operating Room. We propose to build a domain-based medical ontology to represent the clinical terms. A rule-based knowledge base will help detect low-level events and infer medically significant events that occur during a surgery. A stream-processing engine will be used to analyze streams of data available from various sensors in the operating room.