Every day, massive amounts of new healthcare data are generated and recorded in electronic health records. That information is helpful to clinicians, but sorting through it all can be overwhelming and time-consuming. Regenstrief Institute Research Scientist Titus Schleyer, DMD, PhD, is developing solutions to streamline the process.
Dr. Schleyer is rethinking the tools clinicians use to interact with information, and he shared his research during a recent Mayo Clinic Clinical Informatics Grand Rounds presentation. His areas of focus include curating information from multiple sources into a single overview, facilitating search with computer-generated recommendations, and helping clinicians focus on what is important through condition-oriented health records.
During his presentation, Dr. Schleyer outlined current processes for interacting with information in an EHR and described potential solutions to address information overload. He highlighted results of the real-world implementation of his award-winning project Health Dart. The app uses a FHIR®-based approach to pull relevant data from the health information exchange into the EHR for emergency department (ED) clinicians. It collects data relevant to seven of the most common presenting complaints of people in the ED, and drastically reduces the amount of time and effort providers need to spend searching for the information. It also measurably increases the degree to which clinicians use health information exchange information. Health Dart is in use in the EDs of all Indiana University Health hospitals in Indiana. It was created in a collaboration among Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), Indiana University Health and Indiana University School of Medicine.
Dr. Schleyer is also working to create recommendation algorithms to facilitate EHR searches, similar to the way many computer systems recommend items of interest to their users.
About Titus K. Schleyer, DMD, PhD
In addition to his role as a Regenstrief Institute research scientist, Titus K. Schleyer, DMD, PhD, is the director of learning health systems at Indiana University Health. He is also a professor of biomedical informatics at Indiana University School of Medicine.