Informatics in Medicine Unlocked (Jan 2020)
Health digital state and Smart EHR systems
Abstract
Background: The digital transformation is a technological revolution that now penetrates all aspects of society, including health and care systems. To digitalize business processes in health and care, new concepts and innovative solutions are needed. Health is a self-evident concept yet, at the same time, it is extremely elusive because no precise definition of it has been provided. Digitizing the health of individuals to enable data analytics methods to support healthcare professionals is an important objective in the digitalization of decision making processes. This article introduces the “health digital state” (HDS) as a digital equivalent to the “health” concept. The HDS shapes the knowledge that underpins the decisions of healthcare professionals when diagnosing and establishing treatment. The article also introduces the Smart EHR system, an infrastructure platform for EHRs designed to assist healthcare professionals in making decisions using the HDS. Method: 1. We begin by analyzing the possibility of quantifying health in order to digitize it. 2. We hypothesize that at the time of diagnosis specific mental representations of the patient's health are formed in the minds of healthcare professionals. We call these “induced health states” (IHSs). 3. With the help of a Smart EHR system, IHSs can be captured and digitized as “digitized induced health states” (DIHSs). 4. Smart EHR can use existing DIHSs to obtain a patient's HDS. 5. We consider HDS to be a digital equivalent of the concept of health that can be used in the digitalization of diagnostic and treatment processes. Results: For each individual, Smart EHR uses a Virtual Health Record (VHR) to generate an intelligent agent that acts as an avatar for the individual's health. It interacts with healthcare professionals, providing information on any aspect of an individual's health, proactively offering solutions, and helping them diagnose and decide on the right treatment.
