Centralized EHR System for Reconciling Patient Data Across Institutions
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current electronic health record (EHR) systems face challenges in aggregating and standardizing patient data across multiple healthcare institutions, leading to inefficiencies in data access, communication, and usability, particularly due to differences in patient identifiers and lack of centralized linking, which hinders effective data sharing and collaboration among healthcare providers.
Innovation Solution
A computer-implemented method that aggregates medical data from multiple sources by reconciling patient data using a centralized medical records database, verifying authorized providers, and presenting data in a unified view, allowing for selective authorization and filtering to ensure secure and efficient access to patient medical histories.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If EHR systems aggregate data from multiple healthcare institutions, then data accessibility and coordination of care improve, but device complexity and implementation costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized EHR system that acts as an intermediary between multiple healthcare institutions and patients. This central hub receives, standardizes, and stores data from various sources using common protocols, making data accessible without requiring direct integration between all institutions. The intermediary handles the complexity of data reconciliation and provider verification, shielding users from underlying system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The EHR system implements universal data standards and common protocols that enable multiple healthcare institutions with different systems to interoperate. By adopting universally accepted data formats and communication standards, the system can aggregate data from diverse sources without requiring custom integration for each institution, reducing overall system complexity while improving data accessibility.
2Adaptability or versatility
If EHR systems implement centralized data aggregation, then data sharing and collaboration improve, but security risks and authorization complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary verification of provider authorization before allowing data access or modification. By checking authorization credentials in advance and establishing trust relationships beforehand, the system enables seamless data sharing among authorized providers without requiring complex real-time authorization negotiations. The complexity of verification is handled upfront during provider onboarding and credential validation.
3Measurement precision
If EHR systems reconcile patient identifiers from multiple sources, then data accuracy and patient matching improve, but processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary patient identification and matching when data is first received from healthcare institutions. By reconciling patient identifiers upfront and creating standardized patient records before clinical use, the system avoids time-consuming matching operations during patient care delivery. Pre-processing of patient identity data reduces real-time processing requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates standardized copies of patient records with unified identifiers that can be rapidly accessed and exchanged. Instead of performing complex real-time matching operations on original diverse data formats, the system maintains standardized replicas of patient data that can be quickly retrieved and shared, reducing processing time while maintaining matching accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
In an embodiment, a computer-implemented method aggregates medical data from a plurality of source providers. In the method, medical data is received from a source provider. This medical data may be associated with patient-identification information. In order to aggregate this data with other data about the same patient, this data is then reconciled with existing patient medical data records in a medical records database to identify a master patient to whom the received medical data relates. The medical records database includes a plurality of different types of patient medical data records, and each data record is associated with a corresponding time and a corresponding source. Verification is performed to confirm that the source provider associated with the received medical data is authorized to add medical data related to the identified master patient, and finally a new medical data record containing the received medical data is written to the database.