The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me

A very interesting post:

The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me

in which Joe Bugajski describes how far we are from an electronic health record environment that would serve the patient. The situation described is one in which the patient, as he moves through the healthcare system, is called upon to answer questions, over and over again, in ways that give rise to multiple opportunities for inconsistency. Authoritative data about the patient's condition from the patient's own doctor is treated, at best, as just one minor ingredient in the mix.

One heroic medical professional, the first nurse I met in ICU, worked to create a consistent record of my condition, allergies, and medications in the hospital’s electronic health information system. She spent over one hour searching for previously entered data, correcting errors, and moving or reentering data. She argued with one doctor whose concurrent access to the hospital’s system blocked my nurse’s access to my information. She called the hospital’s pharmacy repeatedly to get my medications delivered. She met and called doctors several times. She even convinced one doctor and a pharmacist to come to my room to resolve data errors in person. Despite these heroic efforts, I never received correct medications during my stay. Indeed, my wife snuck one of my inhalers into my room. After I used it, I finally began to recover.

The inconsistencies arise, in part at least, from the absence of any consistent common framework for data entry on the side of the electronic health record. The HL7 RIM might conceivably contribute to filling this gap; but the RIM, as we know, is focused not on the patient's condition, or on the events transpiring on the side of the patient, but rather on the transactions of healthcare professionals. It rests, in other words, on a view of the electronic health record as a collection of statements “not about what was true of the patient but [about] what was observed and believed by clinicians” [1].

The exact causes of the problems documented by Bugajski are still to be determined. One way of summarizing the argument of this blog is that it seeks to make the case for a more incremental, evidence-based, and patient-centered approach to the EHR, and for a regime in which standards are imposed only when they have been proven in use.

[1] Rector AL, Nolan WA, and Kay S. Foundations for an Electronic Medical Record. Methods of Information in Medicine 30: 179-86, 1991.

Postlude (1) May 1, 2009
Another version of Bugajski's narrative can be found here, which points to do major problems which must be addressed if the vision of seemless interoperability of healthcare records is to be realized: the problem of building a consistent ontology of the enormous and rapidly evolving medical domain; and the shortage of people with the skills and training needed to realize this goal:

The first problem with modeling healthcare data is that models must represent certain concepts (and not others) that will remain stable and true long enough to be built into computer software then used by healthcare providers and patients. Mr. Obama, have you noticed just how much knowledge has, is, and will be accumulating in the medical sciences? Knowledge is codified using words - medical knowledge uses copious quantities of difficult words taken from several languages. Words that recur frequently in a particular context become imbued with a meaning that includes the context (e.g., the White House). Such words then come to symbolize a bigger idea than originally intended (i.e., a "house" that happens to be "white", versus your administration and not the house). In medicine, how many stable words exist? These words - nay, well-formed concepts, repeatable, agreed by the medical community - can be modeled and added to computers to store records. Go one step further. Specialization in ER, ICU, cardiac care, pulmonology, oncology, radiology, and other medical subjects exists because the cumulative knowledge defines a large ontology. The ontology, taxonomy, skills, and knowledge of an medical subject area then can be referenced with one word - the name of the specialty. Unfortunately, words that refer to a concept in one specialty often mean something different in another specialty.
The second problem is the lack of good modelers. These people, specialists in data engineering, a subfield of software engineering, transform concepts into graphical and lexical patterns that are used to create computer records. The concepts they model are words (nouns and verbs) plus concepts used by practitioners to describe a patient's medical condition, or a critical care pathway, medications, instructions to patients and nursing staff, tests, and diagnoses. Who among us has the modeling skills to encode this data? As information varies across specialties, how should it be encoded? Empirical evidence suggests that engineers who built the electronic health records network at the two facilities that "cared for me" tried to do this, but they failed. Their data model had irreconcilable silos of information spread across specialties and expressed as incomplete taxonomies (entities), inadequate ontologies (attributes), and poor associativity (relationships). Hence, when programmers added those bad data models to the health information systems, those systems later lost critical information about patients' condition, listed wrong medications,isolated prior diagnoses from current observations, in short, made very bad medicine.

Postlude (2): July 4, 2009
Joe Bugajski's Reply to "Proper Perspective Needed..." (April 21, 2009):

I admire, voted for, and strongly support President Obama. I support his vision of a National Health Network (NHN). I strongly disagree with his administration’s $20 billion conclusion that technology and technologists stand ready to build the NHN today. While I know little about practicing medicine, I am an authority (30 experience and many publications) in data interoperability and system integration. Hence, I cannot comment about treatment effectiveness - you and others generously provided these insights. I can write about data in the context of a system design.

The crux of the data model issue is this. If data cannot be made reliably available across silos in a single EHR, then this data cannot be made reliably available to a huge, heterogeneous collection of networked systems. Furthermore, poor quality data models and low quality user interface design convolve into serious data access and use problems for practitioners and their patients. Data models are my immediate concern relative to the NHN, but interface design also needs attention (also a fit subject for study in the NHN context). Further to data models, integration of information across an exceedingly complex, networked, data storage and retrieval topology remains an area of active research. (Indeed, my clients in every industry worldwide struggle with the issues daily - just for in-house systems.) Contrast data integration for NHN with the technology and expertise used to build the interstate highway system – 30 years of networked data knowledge versus 3000 years of road building knowledge. Consider too that technologically advanced, caring, and world-class medical institutions own and operate the troubled systems in question. These experts have immediate access to the best minds in computer, data, and network technologies. If they cannot reliably move data from one department to another, or across the street to from one to the other, how then do the rest of us cope?

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