Healthcare in the Digital Age - The Future of Health Records

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.