Ali Hamou, Pulse infoframe, London, Canada Joseph Lindsay, centre for cognitive research- Parkwood Hospital, london, Canada Michael Borrie, Geriatrics- Parkwood Hospital, London, Canada Femida Gwadry-Sridhar*, Lawson Health and Western University, RR 3 Ilderton, Canada Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Business modelling in eHealth Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Efficient and quality health care is a widely discussed topic, yet solutions are less pervasive and few solutions consider workflow in their design. This is important with the focus on patient engagement and outcome measurement. Disease registries provide a mechanism to engage patients and collect longitudinal data in an efficient and dynamic way. We created a platform- healthie, which is a unique cloud-based longitudinal tracking registry for the treatment and outcome management of patients with specific diseases. Our system’s design was informed by healthcare providers coupled with an extensive review of existing systems and published literature. Usability and functionality were key considerations which we accomplished using interactive visual displays for disease features and built in analytics or data mining tools to answer questions relevant to different end-users. The workflow reflected how physicians and health care providers practice in their clinics , while at the same time maintaining a consistent standardized data standard that allows fulsome data collection that would provide value. The modules we created include patient demographics, clinical and imaging markers, patient surveys, security, reporting and analysis features.


Healthcare organizations have finally recognized that non-minable health data in a digital format does not reveal the necessary data for quality reporting and analysis without a considerable effort and collaboration. The cumbersome process currently involved in data capture and mining has negatively impacted on how healthcare providers view electronic data collection and reporting, which in turn affects the quality of data and documentation. With our healthie platform, we have attempted to mimic the data representation and workflow used in a standard clinical practice by creating highly usable and customized data collection screens with longitudinal tracking. The resulting increase in quality control ensures accurate patient record entry ensuring better analytics.


The platform has been tuned to a range of customized disease subspecialties, while providing the following global features:
• a common platform interface with universal global search,
• a local and national data reporting ability of outcomes,
• simplified in browser modeling and analytics
• data validation ranges for all fields entered within the platform, preventing miscellaneous data entry error,
• administrative permissions which can be granted and revoked from any user on the system (ACL),
• transaction support on all records with system wide auditing and logging,
• query tools for all permissible datasets (researchers will have the ability to query dump datasets they manage/have stewardship over),


The platform also provides aggregated reporting via user defined parameters which facilitate the research of patient outcomes whether it be at a local site or across a national dataset. These population based reports provide insight on various treatment times and overall survival of patients across the entire registry. Best practices can then be extrapolated from the sites that are achieving better scores and disseminated to the rest of the registry network.

In order to protect and ensure the privacy of all patients several steps were taken in the design of this cloud-based solution. Each patient is given an identifier that is linked back to a master list only available at the local site (by an approved coordinator). As such, if the database was ever compromised no identifiable patient health information could be ascertained about a single patient. Furthermore, other possible identifiers are stored using a coded syntax (i.e. dates of birth are stored as computed “months of life”). A user readable audit log of all activity on the system is available within the platform for the ‘audit users-group’.

With increasing global interest in comparative effectiveness research, patient engagement and patient-provider communication, web based systems like ours can provide both data and communication that benefits various end-users in a dynamic and usable way. Clinicians and patients who use our system have realized increased efficiency because of the workflow, self-efficacy and better disease management strategies. The development and implementation should always include end-users who can provide valuable expertise in the design phase of these systems, which helps their uptake.