Medical Summary Software - The idea

There is (finally) a push to get medical documents digitized. Digital medical documents facilitate a number of interesting ideas including doing data analysis to connect genes with diseases and using medical history to predict future problems. In addition to those large (insurance) uses, there are smaller efficiency-oriented uses for these data.

Doctors and other medical professionals need to review patient files before seeing them. Looking over a patient’s medical history can take a lot time or, more realistically, take a moderate amount of time but a involve a lot more skimming. What these doctors really need is a summary of the relevant parts of the patient’s medical history given what the patient has come in for. If the patient is complaining about chest pain, any previous heart problems and cholesterol levels and cholesterol drugs would be clearly relevant, hearing loss probably would not.

The software should be an aid to doctors to also look for hints of other things in the patient’s past that might be related. For example, the doctor should be able to get a summary of everything in the patients history related to shoulder injuries in case the chest/shoulder pain is from an old injury and not pain from a heart problem. The process should be fast and interactive where the doctor can enter and refine queries over seconds. Faster interactive summary software could make doctors more efficient and more effective at diagnosis.