Rethinking the Design Space of EHRs towards Modeling Tools: A Pathway for Healthcare to join the “Design Disciplines” (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Given the increasing complexity of patient cases due to an aging population and multimorbidity, it has become essential to capture encounters between patients and physicians with greater nuance. The current method of using Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is limited in its ability to do so. This is because EHRs mostly arrange discrete concepts using static spatial allocation of widgets to denote data types which are navigated by physicians in order to cognitively formulate their relationships between elements on the go. This results in cognitive overload experienced by physicians as well as data fragmentation. Moreover, it lacks the ability to express the discrete elements with the non-discrete. For example, expressing why (non-discrete) a lab (discrete) was ordered for a patient. This paper is proposed by Aurora, a group of people working on resolving these challenges with the proposed framework. The Aurora framework introduces the ideal properties for modeling and design in healthcare such as expressiveness and information synthesis. Moreover, it builds a solution using domain specific languages to achieve these properties.