Say Goodbye to the ‘Paper on Screen’, Rethinking Presentation of and Interaction with Medical Information

Abstract

Traditionally, Electronic Medical Records (EMR) have been designed to mimic paper records. Organizing and presenting medical information along the lines that evolved for non-digital records over the decades, reduced change management for medical users, but failed to make use of the potential of organizing digital data. We proposed a method to create clinical dashboards to increase the usability of information in the medical records. Official clinical guidelines were studied by a working group, including dashboard target users. Necessary clinical concepts contained in the medical records were identified according to the clinical context and finally, dedicated technical tools with standard terminologies were used to represent categories of information. We used this method to generate and implement a dashboard for sepsis. The dashboard was found to be appropriate and easy to use by the target users.