2018 Volume 56 Issue 1 Pages 1-7
Medical conferences, in which doctors and other clinical practitioners consider treatment policies for patients, are instrumental in providing advanced and safe medical care at large medical institutions. However, they face the following challenges. 1) Because existing medical information systems are ineffective in extracting information alluding to patients discussed during medical conferences and in integrated management of patient information related to diverse aspects, extraction tasks burden the personnel involved. These personnel must gather the clinical course, examination results, and treatment details in advance, as well as other materials necessary to understand and assess a medical condition. 2) Because these data are distributed and stored in various medical information systems, considerable time and effort are spent in manipulating multiple systems simultaneously. This necessity also hinders the grasp of information at a medical conference. In this study, we constructed a conference support information system that retrieves information from multiple medical information systems in a cross-sectional manner. The system extracts relevant information about the target patient of a medical conference, and provides an integrated user experience (UX). We also attempted to resolve the afore-mentioned problems. Testing and evaluating our conference support information system showed that medical conference preparation time was shortened. Our system also contributed to improving the conference itself, through the effectiveness of the system’s inter-system information gathering capabilities and integrated UX at the medical conference. These results suggest the possibility that public application programming interface in medical information systems may generate new support services.
