Richesson Submits NIH R21 Application

Kudos to Rachel Richesson and her entire team for the submission of their NIH R21 application entitled “Automated Generation of Interdisciplinary and Interoperable Patient Problem Lists." This proposal request funding for a two-year period with a start date of April 1, 2018.

Abstract: The problem lists generated by commercial EHR systems are focused on medical diagnoses; patient problems documented by nurses and other health professionals are not explicitly included. However, coordinated care and targeted decision support will require access to the complete and broad range of patient problems (e.g., known risk factors, pertinent history of illness, and chronic or untreated symptoms) aggregated into a comprehensive, accurate, and interdisciplinary problem list. The development of an interdisciplinary patient problem list requires that patient problems documented by different providers using different EHR interfaces be transformed into a common representation. The goal of this prosed project is to develop a specification to automate the aggregation and harmonization of patient problems from different places in the EHR into a common representation in order to create an EHR-based interdisciplinary problem list. The proposed research will identify and normalize a set of patient problems derived from EHR data, explore the semantics associated with how and where they are documented in the EHR, and transform the patient problems to a common reference standard (SNOMED CT and FHIR). The process will be evaluated by replicating the approach to demonstrate an interdisciplinary problem list in 2 organizations.