Patient-Centric Automatic Medical Record-Keeping and Data Analytic Tool for Enhanced Analysis

What is it about?

The paper discusses the development of a web-based tool called AVCPR (Analytics and Visualization of Clinical Pathology Reports) that aims to simplify the process of accessing and analyzing patients' clinical pathology records. Often, patients tend to misplace or neglect their older reports, making it challenging for doctors to review their medical history during appointments. For accurate diagnoses and effective treatment analyzing and comparing patients' recent and older test reports are necessary. But the traditional process of analyzing multiple test reports back and forth is inconvenient. AVCPR provides a patient-centric platform where individuals can upload and store images of their clinical pathology reports. This allows patients to have easy access to their own health records and share them with doctors for better analysis. The tool features a standard authentication system, user dashboard, profile and settings options, report upload interface, automatic extraction of structured information from reports, organized record-keeping with risk factor indicators, and comparison charts. By digitizing and organizing clinical pathology reports, AVCPR eliminates the reliance on clinicians and healthcare organizations for record-keeping. It empowers patients to take control of their medical data, ensuring they have access to their complete health history. In addition, the tool has the potential for future use in research and education, as systematically stored patient data can be valuable for analysis and further studies. Overall, AVCPR simplifies the process of storing, accessing, and sharing clinical pathology reports, providing doctors with a more organized and convenient way to review patients' medical records and make informed diagnoses.

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Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Why is it important?

AVCPR is a patient-centric automatic clinical pathology record-keeping and information-exchangeable application where patients only need to upload their test reports. It doesn’t require the intervention of any clinical professionals. This potentially reduces clinicians’ extra workload on record-keeping and lets them solely focus on patient care. The systematic procedure of the application is automatic, therefore, doesn’t require skill training or sustaining approaches. AVCPR was developed keeping the research and education concept in mind, hence, patient records are stored in a structured electronic format and are applicable in the research sector without requiring any format pre-processing. From Bangladesh’s perspective, Electronic Health Record culture still has not yet spread widely. Even though many healthcare facilities employ an EMR system, our patient care culture mostly explores traditional method which involves patient-doctor face-to-face interactions and handling a paper copy of patients’ diagnostic reports. In many cases, the patient brings only the most recent reports, unorganized and inconsistent reports, and in some cases no reports at all. Patients can share their clinical records stored in the application with their respective doctors whenever required. There are no official rules, regulations, or restrictions on sharing patients’ full medical histories as “AVCPR” centers around patients rather than any healthcare organization. AVCPR also deals with different units of measurement by converting them into the similar unit if required. Our solution offers patients and doctors a record-sharing and -accessing interface, the flexibility to access certain records by test or upload date, tabular records with color-coding that indicates the risk factor of any tested materials, and generating a comparison chart of multiple test reports, therefore, providing a more convenient approach than traditional patient care.