Based on a comprehensive survey of Thuringian health-care professionals’ needs, a shared electronic medication chart was among the most frequently issued demands to improve interprofessional treatment of mostly elderly patients suffering from dementia.
The resulting electronic medication chart that was developed to cater those needs is based on the specification of the Drug Commission of the German Medical Association [1]. This electronic medication chart provides health-care professionals with a unified view of a patient’s current medication, lists the drugs currently prescribed, and helps to check for unintended side effects more easily. An exemplary medication chart is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 A screenshot of the demonstrator, illustrating the electronic medication chart.
We are currently supporting version 2.0 of this proposal that provides slight improvements in terms of data encoding, data reduction, and data economy. Likewise, we support the special print and scan features that were introduced in version 1.6 and allow for converting the medication chart into a matrix barcode that is added to any printed copy of the chart and allows for fast and reliable transfer back into the electronic form. However, there is still no final official decision on how the chart should be structured, which is why we store the actual medication content in a tabular manner inside of a CDA document.
To further enhance the applicability of the electronic medication chart, our platform provides a diff-feature to compare subsequent versions of a patient’s medication chart in order to outline recent changes in terms of added, modified, or discontinued prescriptions (see Figure 3). Additionally, it is possible to display the evolution of a patient’s medication in a graphical history view, illustrating the beginning, end, and the type of drugs taken at a specific point in time or during a specific time period.
Figure 3 A screenshot of the demonstrator, illustrating the diff-feature of our electronic medication chart.
These features enable healthcare professionals to easily identify, comprehend, and react to changes introduced by their colleagues. Studying the evolution of a patient’s medication chart in turn allows them to draw further conclusions on a patient’s medical condition, e.g. by relating sudden changes in a patient’s mental health score to preceding medication events.
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