An Electronic Health Record Model for the Spatial Epidemiological Analysis of Clinical Data

The main purpose of this work is to develop an Electronic Health Record (EHR), for the registration of clinical data, combined spatial Databases and GIS techniques. The main idea behind this work is the development of a real time efficient EHR environment in which clinical data could be analyzed and combined directly providing sections like statistical analysis, graphical presentation and GIS representation introducing disease monitoring. These monitoring results could be used as pilot directions for the spatial epidemiological analysis taking advantage geographical information for understanding the dynamics of health. Moreover the role of spatial information in the health sector in relation to the benefits of the GIS systems is illustrated combined with the spatial assumptions introducing a real-time health monitoring tools and geographic information systems. The EHR includes demographic data of the patients, followed by clinical data of the current and previous hospital admissions (like blood test data, medical actions, biological examinations, etc). The data can easily be extracted from the database for the implementation of statistical analysis with the use of the appropriate software. Demonstration of the system based on a short patient dataset was performed showing the benefits of the HER.