Distributed Medical Decision Support Systems

摘要

Availability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) differs by country with the United States lagging behind many European countries. Within the United States the Veterans Affairs medical centers have the most extensive EHRs followed by groups such as Kaiser. While EHRs from different vendors have different formats, progress has been made using HL7 standards to allow efficient communication among different EHR formats. The establishment of universal EHRs will provide the basis for comprehensive automated analysis of health records and also form the basis for the establishment of a personal health record (PHR) that contains information for an individual's entire lifetime. Comprehensive automated disease analysis will require cooperative work from many sources to clearly define diagnostic and prognostic factors for all diseases. In this paper a structure is outlined that will facilitate diagnosis based on the PHR that will follow each patient from birth. This paradigm will permit individual diagnosis and prognosis rather than reliance on population statistics.