The majority of healthcare workers in hospitals continue to record,
access and update important patient information using paper
charts. Disparate patient data (clinical information, laboratory
results and medical imagery) is entered by different caregivers and
stored at different locations around the hospital. This is a
cumbersome, time consuming process that can result in critical medical
errors such as documents being mislaid or prescriptions being
misinterpreted due to illegible handwriting. Hospitals everywhere are
moving to integrate health data sources using electronic health record
(EHR) systems as well as taking advantage of the flexibility and speed
of wireless computing to improve the quality and reduce the cost of
healthcare. We are developing a mobile application that allows doctors
to efficiently access accurate real-time patient information at the
point-of-care. The system can assist caregivers in automatically
searching through very large repositories of previous patient cases as
increasingly large hospital databases are making manual searches of
such information unfeasible. The system performs computational
prognosis by providing decision support for pre-screening of medical
diagnosis. A presenting patient's symptoms can be input to a portable
device and the application can quickly retrieve the most similar
profiles with known diagnoses from large databases which can be used
to compare treatments, diagnosis, test results and other information.