Electronic Medical Records

An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is a medical record or any other information relating to the past, present or future physical and mental health, or condition of a patient which resides in computers for the primary purpose of providing health care and health-related services. EHRs improve clinical quality by providing ready access to all relevant clinical information at the time of the patient encounter or phone call, receipt of clinical alerts at the point of care, the ability to easily monitor and analyze patient outcomes. The EHR software’s currently available in the markets are very expensive and require extensive training before physicians can use these systems. Also all these systems require the physician or nurse to enter the data in the record manually.

We have developed a smart context-aware system to build an EHR to record the medically significant events of a surgery, by analyzing the data streams obtained from various sensors deployed in an Operating Room (OR). This record then becomes a part of the patient’s medical history. This record will provide the next physician an accurate account of the medical treatment given to the patient. Sensors in the OR include the blood oxygen monitor, the heart rate monitor etc.

Data from these sensor streams is analyzed using a stream processing engine to extract the low level events, such as high blood pressure etc, occurring during the surgery. These events are correlated using techniques such as multi-variable analysis, trend based analysis etc to identify events that become a part of the electronic medical record. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is used to acquire contextual information such as presence of medical staff in the operating room and identification of medicines used during the surgery.