title: What particulars are referred to in Electronic Health Record data? A case study in integrating Referent Tracking into an EHR application.
abstract: Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. We describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is based in order to allow integration efforts to be applied in similar ways to other EHR applications. We find that an ordinary statement from an EHR contains a surprising amount of "hidden" data that are only revealed by its decomposition according to these principles.
authors.affiliation: Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Ron
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rudnicki
authors.forename: Werner
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ceusters
authors.forename: Shahid
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Manzoor
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D005568:Forms and Records Control; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled