Abstract:
The single-model approach of several electronic health record systems having the medical domain
concepts hard-coded directly into its software and database model although allows for relatively quick
development of software faces the problem of the limitation in the ability of software and databases to
keep up with extending requirements of users and causes further interoperability problems.
As the health sector adapt changes in accordance to health reform agenda, information models and
medical domain concepts of existing systems may need to be changed. In order to address these needs,
Template-based Electronic Health Record System (tempEHR) system was designed and developed that
allows health professionals to define data items they want to record and then design the template for
recording and retrieving data without any knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The
system can be used to attain a high degree of local autonomy among EHR of different medical fields with
enough global coordination in medical concepts used to ensure data consistency while supporting
different data recording and retrieving needs of health professionals.
TempEHR empowers health professionals to define content, semantics, and user interfaces of systems
independently from the software. It is a highly flexible and adaptive system since its runtime behavior is
driven by templates and variable definitions created and maintained by the end users, the health
professionals themselves. Requirements unforeseen by the software developers can be easily
accomplished by creating new or updating existing templates and variables. It also gives same validation
tools to health records which lead to better data quality for secondary uses of health records like health
surveillance and research. it also supports plugins for additional needs of health professionals while
creating health records. tempEHR users can also create standardized reports which are very helpful in
health surveillance.
