Digital Health Record

The digital health record is the central tool used to manage the health data and medical knowledge of a patient.

##Different types of data

The medical data stored in a health record has different qualities. It can contain statements about a persons family history, a chronology of treatments, examination results, symptom diaries. Some data is rather static: the list of allergies and prescriptions, personal features (gender, date of birth). Other data is dynamic: the time course of symptoms, the relationships between symptoms and environmental factors.

##Different perspectives on data A health record can be viewed from different perspectives depending on the informational needs of the viewer. A doctor might be interested in the list of drugs taken by a patient. The patient might be interested in the development of a specific symptom within the last weeks. One is a simple list of items, the other is a visualization on a timeline, a graph, a heat map.

The static parts of medical data and its representation have already been addressed - the health design challenge, for example, has produced very good results, which only wait for implementations to be done.

Tools for managing the dynamic aspects of medical conditions have received a lot less of attention. One very important aspect of medical condition(s) is the way how symptoms, treatments and other factors are intertwined - the cause and effect relationships. This aspect can be modelled very well using a directed graph as the underlying model and a visual mapping tool as its user interface.