Open AccessHealthcare in the Digital Age - The Future of Health Records
Author(s) -
AUTHOR_ID,
Eliot Slevin
Publication year - 2021
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Dissertations/theses
DOI - 10.26686/wgtn.17067950
Subject(s) - vendor , health care , medical record , software , software development , quality (philosophy) , knowledge management , digital health , process (computing) , medical software , process management , computer science , software engineering , engineering management , data science , engineering , software quality , medicine , business , marketing , political science , philosophy , epistemology , law , radiology , programming language , operating system
Electronic Health Record software (EHR), is used by medical professionals regularly to interact with patient records. The functionality of this software is key to public health, however the quality of this software does not match it's importance, or its cost. Developing innovative healthcare software is a difficult due to the inherent challenges of complexity, risk, and distribution faced by healthcare software. In response these challenges, this thesis proposes Barnett: a novel system to store, share, and interact with health records across institutions. Notably, this system moves control from the vendor to the user - through iterative, crowd based improvement, and ownership. This allows the system to fit unique, and varied user needs. Barnett was developed through an interdisciplinary qualitative research process, grounded in perspectives from design, software engineering, healthcare; and interviews with healthcare professionals. The survey of current EHRs, healthcare models, and the design process indicates that developing systems which enable a faster iterative cycle of design, development, and distribution is potentially a more sustainable approach to electronic health records.