The intelligent interface for online electronic medical records using temporal data mining

This paper presents work that has been conducted towards predicting user input requirements with view to making an intelligent interface to support data input. The principles are considered within the context of an online electronic medical record system where it is particularly valuable to have intelligent support. The intelligent interface involves the incremental data mining of existing records. The information mined from the data is used to predict current input requirements to improve, among other things, the efficiency of data entered for that user. The use of temporal information in predicting requirements is explored using a case specific and a case independent approach which respectively involve maintaining histories of past treatments and abstracting intervals of problem duration to predict medication. The results show that the case specific approach is very useful although predictions are limited exactly to what has already been encountered in the patient history. The case independent approach is more useful and compares favorably with a simple cross-sectional model. Further work is suggested to investigate incremental temporal data mining