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Hack Ideas
Feel free to add your own ideas here. If you prefer, you can send us a message with your ideas here
We can't promise that developers will choose to work on every suggestion, but if you're coming along to the hackday, we've scheduled some time on Monday evening and Tuesday morning for pitching projects so you can get people excited about your idea.
Proposed By: Dr Maria Jalmbrant, Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Lewisham adult ASD & ADHD service, Lewisham University Hospital
This is an issue that if solved would have massive impact on our (and probably others') services as well.
In keeping with the requirements for evidence based practice, we use a range of screening and outcome measures. These are questionnaires that we ask patients to complete or varying formats (typically semantic differential or Likert scales). We are currently using paper copies that we are posting out and requesting that our patients return by post, or complete in sessions. When these have been returned, we spend a large amount of our clinical time scoring these and creating data bases of these scores. I have tried to search for a better way of doing this – ideally electronically since it was a while now since we entered the 21st century, however I have not yet been able to find a suitable programme where the questionnaires can be inputted and subsequently scored on an individual case by case basis according to the varying scoring rules for each scale. Most programmes (e.g. survey monkey are geared towards groups and is able to summarise scores by calculating means and other measurements of central tendency, but this would not be of much use in this context. In an ideal world, we should be able to email a link to our patients, ask them to complete the questionnaires online or ask them to complete the questionnaires in the waiting rooms of the clinic on handheld devices, immediately be able to access their summary score as well as individual responses on a computer programme that is acceptable to the trust computers, and also be able to access the scores in a word file (the patients individual summary scores to be uploaded on the trust patient data system - PJS) and an excel file (for summary data analysis of some or all patients).
Proposed By: Richard Jackson, Text-Mining Lead, Clinical Informatics Group
Despite the existence of structure fields in the SLaM clinical record, much of the useful information is entered as free text. In psychiatry, probably more than in any other area of medicine, it is difficult for clinicians to accurately express their observations about a patient using dropdown menus and standard coding schemes or taxonomies like ICD10 and Snomed CT. If we wish to do any computation on this data, we currently have to use natural language processing tools to extract the information from the text. This is challenging and inevitably not 100% accurate. If we accept that a very structured EHR isn't going to work for psychiatry, then maybe we should just try to get better at capturing the data in free text. We would like to try to build an interface that lets clinicians enter their observations and reports in free text, but also helps them to use standard terms, flags data that really ought to go in structured fields like measurements or test results etc. But, this assistance must be un-intrusive and fit in with their workflows. If it all goes a bit Windows Paperclip they'll just turn it off.
Proposed By: Richard Jackson, Text-Mining Lead, Clinical Informatics Group
It would be great to have better ways of browsing a patient's record. It would be great to have some kind of browsable timeline that automatically highlights important information and events. Like a summly for EHRs.