CSE300 – 01 Topics in Biomedical Informatics Team Semester Design/Development Project Due Dates: Various Milestones for Semester 1Overview of Team Project The purpose of the team project this semester is to design and prototype a framework and infrastructure that centers around a collaborative web portal for allowing three primary user groups, patients, providers, and clinical researchers, to interact with one another. The main focus of the project will be on the framework and the infrastructure, to put into place the techniques, technologies, and tools to facilitate a broad range of medical-based interactions among these three groups. The framework and the interactions are represented in Figure 1. Figure 1. Architecture of Medical Health Informatics Web Portal.PatientsProvidersClinical ResearchersWeb-BasedPortal(XML + HL7)Open Source DB(XML or MySQL)EMRFeedbackRepositoryEducationMaterialsPHR In the figure, there are three primary groups of users all with different aims and objectives: • Clinical Researchers: This group of users has been working in the clinical research area and may have developed new evidence-based medical treatments (or devices) for certain diseases. There is the desire to translate these results into the provider community in order to insure that the most up-to-date medical practice is reaching all levels of the community. For example, at UCHC, their cardiology center publishes a twice-yearly Cardiovascular Gram (see Appendix A), both on its web site and through mass mailings to providers. However, there is currently no means to obtain feedback on the evidence-based medical treatments, including whether the providers are reading the material, and more critically, if they are using the new treatment. In the latter case, the provider may want to interact with a clinician or clinical researcher at UCHC, but has no direct (and secure) vehicle of doing so; an on-line discussion forum may be of use in this situation, either for direct (one-to-one) interactions, or in more of a group setting. Thus, from the clinical researcher’s perspective, there are at least two goals: the electronic dissemination of new evidence-based treatment plans to the provider community; and, the collection ofCSE300 – 01 Topics in Biomedical Informatics Team Semester Design/Development Project Due Dates: Various Milestones for Semester 2various types of feedback (e.g., notification of the visits to certain web pages, registration of providers, input from providers on using the new treatment, etc.) to be used by the clinical researcher to further refine their work. This is represented in the bottom portion of Figure 1, both in the publishing of Education Materials and the existence of a Feedback Repository (e.g., database). The Education materials need to be flexible and multi-modal, with text, audio, video, and other formats supported. This Feedback Repository has potential long-term usage to track the success-rate of the new evidence-based treatment (device) via provider-supplied anonymous patient data/results1. In practice, this Feedback Repository would need to interact with a clinical research repository (or data warehouse) which is used to store ongoing data associated with a clinical trial. While beyond the scope of the project for the semester, there is a vital link between feedback from the community (either ad-hoc or rigorously collected) and ongoing (or prior) clinical research results. Ultimately, a natural extension of providing new treatment regime for providers, is to provide a listing of ongoing or soon-to-start clinical trials (Phases I, II, III, and IV) for both providers and patients.2 • Health Care Providers: This group of users encompasses a wide range of professions, including: primary care physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, education and discharge planning nurses, and so on. This group has one overriding objective, to improve medical treatment for their patients, particularly for those patients with diseases that require constant and vigilant monitoring (e.g., diabetes, asthma, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, etc.). To support this activity, there are two paths of interactions for providers in Figure 1: 1. Providers are interested in learning about new evidence-based medical treatments (devices) and potentially interacting with clinical researchers on the treatments and usage in patients. This interaction was described in the prior bullet item; from the provider side, the ability to find out about these new treatments, learn about them, and communicate with the clinical researcher must be carefully structured for ease-of-use and usability; this will play a major role on its acceptance and success. For example a provider might want to have the data presented to them in short snippets on a daily basis or on a need-to-know basis. This may involve the use of different media (text, audio, video, interactive show, etc.) Eventually, an automated evaluation of potentially qualifying patients would also be helpful for providers; such a capability might be triggered as part of the provider’s EMR that identifies patients trending 1 Please note that the actual collection of anonymous data/results on patients from providers may require some significant steps to overcome HIPPA requirements. Nevertheless, what we are considering for this project is the overall framework and infrastructure to support such collection; whether such collection is possible is future issue. 2 In order to consider this last note, at least as part of the specification process (please see the Project Deliverables and Time Table section), you will have to read about and consider how to make this happen at the point of care – again the framework to present the data is good – how it gets integrated into day-to-day patient care is another question. (how can data present in an EMR be mined to evaluate potential - you may need to think about reviewing some of the Clinical Decision frameworks that are out there. Dr. Thomas Agresta ([email protected]) , an associate professor and Director of Informatics in Department of Family Medicine at UCHC has offered to assist if we tackle this issue.CSE300 – 01 Topics in Biomedical Informatics Team Semester Design/Development Project Due Dates: Various Milestones for Semester 3towards a potential future problem. Longer-term, such a capability may provide the opportunity for providers