TempEHR Template-based Electronic Health Record System

Abstract

The single-model approach of several electronic health record systems having the medical domain concepts hard-coded directly into its software and database model although allows for relatively quick development of software faces the problem of the limitation in the ability of software and databases to keep up with extending requirements of users and causes further interoperability problems. As the health sector adapt changes in accordance to health reform agenda, information models and medical domain concepts of existing systems may need to be changed. In order to address these needs, Template-based Electronic Health Record System (tempEHR) system was designed and developed that allows health professionals to define data items they want to record and then design the template for recording and retrieving data without any knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The system can be used to attain a high degree of local autonomy among EHR of different medical fields with enough global coordination in medical concepts used to ensure data consistency while supporting different data recording and retrieving needs of health professionals. TempEHR empowers health professionals to define content, semantics, and user interfaces of systems independently from the software. It is a highly flexible and adaptive system since its runtime behavior is driven by templates and variable definitions created and maintained by the end users, the health professionals themselves. Requirements unforeseen by the software developers can be easily accomplished by creating new or updating existing templates and variables. It also gives same validation tools to health records which lead to better data quality for secondary uses of health records like health surveillance and research. it also supports plugins for additional needs of health professionals while creating health records. tempEHR users can also create standardized reports which are very helpful in health surveillance.