Characterizing the Structure of a Patient's Care Team through Electronic Encounter Data Analysis.
As the field of medicine grows more complicated and doctors become more specialized in a particular field, the number of healthcare providers involved in healing an individual patient increases. This is particularly true of patients with multiple chronic conditions. Establishing effective communications among the care providers becomes critical to facilitate care coordination and more efficient resource use, which will ultimately result in health outcome improvement. The first step for care coordination is to understand who have been involved in a patient's care and their relationships with the patient. The widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records provides us an opportunity to explore solutions to well-coordinated care. This paper presents the concept of a patient's care team and demonstrates the feasibility of identifying relevant healthcare providers for an individual patient by leveraging electronic patient encounter data. Combined with network analysis techniques, we further visualize the care team structure with quantified strength of patient-provider relationships. Our work is foundational to the larger goal of patient-centered, coordinated care in the digital age of healthcare.
Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
Shan
S
He
Agilex, Chantilly, VA, United States.
Greg
G
Gurr
Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
Susan
S
Rea
Intermountain Healthcare, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
Sidney N
SN
Thornton
D022126:Access to Information; D057225:Data Mining / Q000379:methods*; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010348:Patient Care Team / Q000145:classification* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D014481:United States