Information Summary for Chronic Disease Treatment: A Pediatric Hospital Case in China

The electronic medical record (EMR) systems face many challenges in supporting chronic disease treatment,especially in medical information summary. Many solutions have recently been proposed for hospitals in developed countries. However, these solutions may be not suitable for the hospitals in developing countries because their workflow and patterns may be quite different due to their resource limitations, especially in shortage of physicians. Investigating the information summary alternatives in treating chronic diseases in such hospitals can shed light on EMR system design, especially on that for developing countries. We study one of the best pediatric hospitals in China. It suffers from a severe shortage of physicians. We introduce its information summary alternative, Follow-up Sheet. In particular, we study how and why pediatricians treat chronic diseases with the sheet. Our work unveils the intense work patterns and their corresponding information requirements of hospitals in China. We also demonstrate the characteristics of the Follow-up Sheet and accordingly discuss how EMR systems can be optimized.