title: Leveraging electronic health records to support chronic disease management: the need for temporal data views.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The ageing population worldwide is increasingly acquiring multiple chronic diseases. The complex management of chronic diseases could be improved with electronic health records (EHRs) tailored to chronic disease care, but most EHRs in use today do not adequately support  longitudinal data management. A key aspect of chronic disease management is that it takes place over long periods, but the way that most EHRs display longitudinal data makes it difficult to trend changes over time and slows providers as they review each patient's unique course.
  
  
  METHODS
  We present five clinical scenarios illustrating longitudinal data needs in complex chronic disease management. These scenarios may function as example cases for software development.
  
  
  RESULTS
  For each scenario, we describe and illustrate improvements in temporal data views. Two potential  solutions are visualisation for numerical data and disease-oriented text summaries for non-numerical data.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We believe that development and widespread implementation of improved temporal data views in EHRs will improve the efficiency and quality of chronic disease management  in primary care.
authors.affiliation: Division of General Medicine and Primary Care, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA. lsamal@partners.org
authors.forename: Lipika
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Samal
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wright
authors.forename: Bang T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: Jeffrey A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Linder
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Bates
mesh_terms: D002908:Chronic Disease / Q000628:therapy*; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D019468:Disease Management; D004282:Documentation; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D018802:Patient-Centered Care; D011320:Primary Health Care; D013997:Time Factors; D014584:User-Computer Interface