As I suggested on emrupdate, a timeline would be a great way of summarizing a patient history. This example below was posted by Jason. I have to think on how easy this would be to do ...
I was thinking more of displaying medication data as a sparkline. This means that somehow total daily dosing has to be captured.
Timelines are back on the table. See demo. You need to have entered age of onset, or dates of onset of diagnoses etc for this to work.
[quote user="Graham"] Timelines are back on the table. See demo. You need to have entered age of onset, or dates of onset of diagnoses etc for this to work. [/quote] The demo is cool!! Would, say, multiple episodes of Viral Upper Respiratory Tract Infection, or Sinusitis all be on the same line, but just multiple dots or short bars to indicate each episode and duration? That would be a drag if every episode of sinusitis had to be nested on a different level.
The lines don't mean much ... they're just spacing. If you enter each episode as a discrete one, then they will appear as separate dots. This is a very sophisticated widget from MIT's labs and I haven't got to grips with it yet. I know you can't filter on events once the widget it built, but we can filter on the data provided to it. There are also other neat things like including images in the balloons, and having different time frames inside other frames. Probably overkill most of the time.
The other problem is that this Ajax widget can not be displayed by Synapse's embedded web server ... probably because it is Ajax! So, I will have to switch to using Cheyenne ... and that would mean at least temporarily two embedded web servers!
Looks cool. I am not sure how often I would use this. Now graphing visits (and their tags ?)(and reason for visit), medication changes, important imaging tests, Lab tests, and other sentinel events could help helpful. This could be a visual representation of "Recent Events".
I would prefer not to add another EMR feature at this time. There are still more "Bang for your Buck" needs still. Like a "Patient Summary HomePage" which might be done as a "DataView"
The timeline and your suggestions are all the same thing .. creating a custom view of existing digital artifacts.
This is another timeline showing the immunization data in a 3rd band. I don't think now that adding multiple bands scales well ... because this leads to too much scrolling of the page. So, I will mix all the events onto one page, and use different coloured icons to indicate their type.
I am adding the ability to select different data sources for the timeline. Now, if we use the social history, then we are met with free text; no structured data. I therefore propose that if you want to use an item from the social history, then prefix the event with a *date. Eg. *10-Jan-2004 divorced from spouse. Lost custody of children. Now, this will add a time event at 10-Jan-2008 for the event "Divorce" with description"divorced from spouse. Lost custody of children." Each event needs to be on its own line.
This sounds excellent to me, I'm curious to see just what all can be done with timelines. The *date sounds like a good way to add a date to freeform data. I will try 82 asap, presently inundated with record snow, roof shoveling, flooding, etc.
I've done this, and requests ( well, at least those that were templated ), and visits ... Just looking at the feasibility now of overlaying expected immunizations vs actual immunizations onto the same timeline.