MedKnowts: Unified Documentation and Information Retrieval for Electronic Health Records
This addresses the challenge of fragmented and time-consuming clinical documentation for healthcare professionals, especially in high-pressure settings like the Emergency Department, representing an incremental improvement by integrating existing tools into a unified system.
The paper tackled the problem of tedious and error-prone clinical documentation in Electronic Health Records, particularly in the Emergency Department where clinicians handle up to 35 patients per shift, by developing MedKnowts, an integrated note-taking and information retrieval system that unifies documentation and search, resulting in eased documentation burden through structured data capture and proactive retrieval.
Clinical documentation can be transformed by Electronic Health Records, yet the documentation process is still a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone process. Clinicians are faced with multi-faceted requirements and fragmented interfaces for information exploration and documentation. These challenges are only exacerbated in the Emergency Department -- clinicians often see 35 patients in one shift, during which they have to synthesize an often previously unknown patient's medical records in order to reach a tailored diagnosis and treatment plan. To better support this information synthesis, clinical documentation tools must enable rapid contextual access to the patient's medical record. MedKnowts is an integrated note-taking editor and information retrieval system which unifies the documentation and search process and provides concise synthesized concept-oriented slices of the patient's medical record. MedKnowts automatically captures structured data while still allowing users the flexibility of natural language. MedKnowts leverages this structure to enable easier parsing of long notes, auto-populated text, and proactive information retrieval, easing the documentation burden.