Role-based access in a unified electronic patient record

Abstract

As modern healthcare shifts towards a patient-centric model, there is an increasing emphasis on teamwork. Legacy healthcare information systems are ill equipped to meet new requirements arising from this change. Many projects have been undertaken to address various aspects of the challenge of supporting patient-centric work. In the UK, development and adoption of a unified electronic patient record (EPR) that serves practitioners across the country is a high priority. This article considers what additional support healthcare teams will require beyond the cross-discipline unified EPR. A system that considers practitioners as part of a patient's care team and which tracks teams and professional roles is proposed and evaluated as a means to provide each practitioner with a view of the EPR appropriate to his/her professional role and to provide improved support for collaboration among team members.

Human computer interaction issues in eliciting user requirements for an Electronic Patient Record with multiple users

“…It is also crucial in a multidisciplinary EPR that users will have all relevant and useful data available to them at time of need. Where the objective is to support communication and collaborative work between multiple users taking into account that a particular person may play different roles on different teams, it is necessary to allow for in the design process that team members, teams and roles may evolve and indeed change with time [15]. So, data modelling undertaken prior to the design of the epilepsy EPR will be of benefit to users in their individual roles and also the workshops, prototyping and reporting methodologies used will facilitate collaborative working.…”

“…Designing a successful user interface in an EPR is one of the most important challenges in the field of health informatics. Current health information systems do not sufficiently address usability, and many information systems are lacking in providing access to information when it is required [15]. A poor arrangement of the information on a screen has been shown to delay clinicians in delivering timely clinical decisions [14].…”

Evaluation and implementation of e-health and health information initiatives: International perspectives

“…Skilton et al studied the need for different roles including practitioners regarding access to a unified electronic patient record (EPR) in the UK. 6 The article proposes the use of rolebased access to the EPR displaying information related to the tasks associated with a particular patient. The article also proposes tracking of care team members by introducing a coordinating database.…”