As the clinical world moves to an electronic patient record and clinically relevant information source are increasingly available in network- accessible form, a powerful way to enfranchise the clinician will be to link network information access to the electronic medical record itself. The computer should be able to: 1) scan an electronic patient record, 2) identify the clinical topics (issues) relevant to that patient for which information access might be useful, and then 3) retrieve that information automatically when requested by the clinician. The proposed SBIR project will implement this approach using the World-Wide-Web. Several components will be built: 1) a software engine to carry out the necessary functions, 2) a list of """"""""key clinical topics"""""""" for an area of anesthesiology, 3) """"""""activation logic"""""""" to identify when each topic is potentially relevant to a patient record, and 4) """"""""retrieval logic"""""""" to retrieve information about each topic. Phase I will demonstrate how the approach can be applied to preanesthesia evaluation, linking patient records to Web-based retrieval from information resources on the Anesthesiology Web Sever, GASNet. Phase II of the project will build a fully operational product with the potential for use in many different clinical domains.
Since the proposed product sits at the interface between the electronic patient record and network-based information sources, it will have potentially commercial value to: 1) organizations which build or use electronic patient records, 2)organizations involved in medical electronic publishing, and 3) hospitals and other regional and national health care organizations.
