Electronic Health Records (EHRs) Standards and the Semantic Edge: A Case Study of Visualising Clinical Information from EHRs

Exchanging medical documents over healthcare networks is becoming a reality. This increases the need to effectively manage the growing amount of information for a single patient. Therefore, there is a current need to visualise electronic health records (EHRs) in a way that assist physicians with clinical tasks and medical decision-making. The new methods to visualise clinical information from EHRs should take into account time and be intuitive for clinicians. This paper uses semantic Web technologies and HL7 clinical document architecture (CDA) to provide well-defined interfaces that help clinicians to visualize the medical procedures performed and how clinical findings have changed over the time for a patient. To validate the proposal, the research has focused on diagnosis and clinical management of glaucoma (worldwide, it is the second leading cause of blindness) and the evaluation performed has involved health professionals who are not familiarized with semantic Web technologies.