Visualization of contagious disease outbreak information for primary care physicians

Abstract

This thesis is a part of an ongoing project at NST. This ongoing project has the intention to make a system for early detection of contagious diseases based on symptoms and diagnosis. The main goal of this project is to develop a system that will help detect outbreaks of contagious diseases. The system intends to create a logic model based on collected data from symptoms and diagnosis entered into the primary health care physicians electronic health record system. They will again exchange data with other medical offices and their electronic health record systems. From the information extracted from all electronic health records, the system will try to detect outbreaks of communicable diseases and send out warnings. The thesis I have perform: 1. Try to find out where the primary care physicians collect the information from and how the primary care physicians in future want to collect information related to contagious diseases. 2. Try to find out how the primary care physicians wants the information from the system, that send out messages about probability of contagious disease outbreaks, can be presented. In order to reach these objectives, I have interviewed five primary care physicians, where one of the physicians has responsibility for preventing contagious diseases in a municipality. From the information gathered during the interviews this thesis present some pre-requirements that are needed before a pilot phase. In additional this thesis thru a presentation of possible visualization, present how the visualization of information in a future system can be presented for the primary care physicians. The main conclusion the thesis present is that the physicians want a system that is closely integrated with their own electronic health record system, that present the messages in a easy way with short messages that do not interrupt during patient consultations. The new system also has to be configurable in a way that the physicians themselves can decide when the messages should appear. The project also wanted to recruit as many primary care physicians as possible, to continue to take part in developing the system. The result we have showed that the physicians use Internet and do not use the information on NIPH frequently. The most obvious source of information was colleagues in the medical office. The physicians do not use and hardly know of the official web pages for reporting of contagious disease outbreaks. This thesis also has showed that the primary care physicians have limited of time for doing research in a busy day in practise and they do not use Internet for searching for contagious disease outbreak, but rather use colleagues and other sources of information. We concluded that the classification system that is in use in primary health care among physicians are not able to be use alone as detection of diseases and symptoms registered in electronic health record system in the medical offices. There are two solutions to this problem, one is to alter the existing system of classification, the second solution is to use physician’s habit to make notes inside the system and extract these to the new system. And finally all physicians we interviewed are willing to contribute in pilot-phase in order to develop the system.