The article where I described how to make the EMR smart and useful created great interest and confrontations with different colleagues who asked me for explaining some of those concepts.
I resume the argument showing an example on data utility and neutrality speaking of widget. A very important clinic aspect is the kidney functionality. It is estimated by means of the calculation of Glomerulus Filtration Range. The normal GFR can vary depending on the age, sex, corporal size, and decreases in elder people or because of some pathologies.
An EMR should have widget that the user can decide to position in some pages of the application or they can open (pop-up) in case of special conditions (trigger) set by the user. To widgets a specific page can be associated detailing the showed data.
I’ll show you a simple widget concept for the kidney functionality, just to synthetize the concepts discussed in the previous article.
From top to down and from left to right, the widget includes an icon with the kidney symbol which colour can vary depending on the kidney distress level. On the right of this, you can see the GFR value with date and hour of the last result. Under this value an icon defines the trend of kidney functionality, in this case decreasing. The arrow versus and colour vary depending on the value change and intensity.
Under the kidney icon, a threshold is defined and on the right the instructions of what to do (an alarm message, a therapy variation, tests request, and so on). In the bottom two buttons let access the therapy page and visualise the GFR complete chart.
The same logic can be applied to define widget analysing other important clinic conditions. The advantage of this approach is to provide, in a concise and effective way, a value synthesis which the widget has been designed for, and to associate the needed actions when specific conditions occur.
I would underline that the aim is not to replace doctors or automatise the work, but provide tools to make them more acknowledged and reactive at clinic conditions varying.
Digital-health 