Next Generation Electronic Medical Records and Search: A Test Implementation in Radiology

Presented by David Piraino, Chief Imaging Information Officer, Imaging Institute Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic & Daniel Palmer, Chief Imaging Information Officer, Imaging Institute Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic

Most patient specifc medical information is document oriented with varying amounts of associated meta-data. Most of pateint medical information is textual and semi-structured. Electronic Medical Record Systems (EMR) are not optimized to present the textual information to users in the most understandable ways. Present EMRs show information to the user in a reverse time oriented patient specific manner only. This talk discribes the construction and use of Solr search technologies to provide relevant historical information at the point of care while intepreting radiology images.

Radiology reports over a 4 year period were extracted from our Radiology Information System (RIS) and passed through a text processing engine to extract the results, impression, exam description, location, history, and date. Fifteen cases reported during clinical practice were used as test cases to determine if “”similar”” historical cases were found . The results were evaluated by the number of searches that returned any result in less than 3 seconds and the number of cases that illustrated the questioned diagnosis in the top 10 results returned as determined by a bone and joint radiologist. Also methods to better optimize the search results were reviewed.

An average of 7.8 out of the 10 highest rated reports showed a similar case highly related to the present case. The best search showed 10 out of 10 cases that were good examples and the lowest match search showed 2 out of 10 cases that were good examples. The talk will highlight this specific use case and the issues and advances of using Solr search technology in medicine with focus on point of care applications.