FHIR-based Mail service that updates the next-of-kin of patients on a daily basis about diagnosis in an interactive manner

1. Personalized
Hospital Patient
Newsletter
Sp’18 CS 6440 - IHI
Messengers

2. Team Messengers
Mentor:
Dr. Sydney Law, MD
Emory University
Members:
Chaitanya Bapat MS CS First year
Ashwin Bhide MS CS First year
Anita Ramasamy MS CS First year
Hyeon Woo Shim MS CS First year
Shruti Shinde MS CS First Year

3. What is Aphthous Stomatitis?

4. The Problem
Characteristics of hospital stays:
❖ Dynamic clinical status
➢ New diagnoses daily
➢ Urgent problems and treatment
❖ Hard for patient & family to stay updated.
➢ The nurse is not always updated.
➢ The doctor is not always around (and not always updated either)

5. Currently,
Common practice is to provide
written information to the
patient and family.
However, it can be
time-consuming relative to its
significance.

6. Solution
An automated daily newsletter that is:
● Able to capture the dynamic flow of events
● Updated frequently
● Easily accessible
● Understandable by common people
● Automated

7. Credit: Dr. Sydney Law, MD - Emory University

8. Data
● FHIR data
○ Provides patient specific information
○ Patient’s clinical conditions, diagnosis, medication
● Ontology
○ SNOMED
○ ICD-10
○ NLM-NIH Medlineplus
● Media
○ Image - Scraped from MedlinePlus

9. CRON jobs
- Command crontab
- env EDITOR=nano crontab -e
- <file-name> * * * * *
- * * * * * indicates Minute Hour Day Month Week
Currently proposed daily at 8 a.m. (0 8 * * *)

10. Mongo Database
Socket Address - 127.0.0.1:27017
Database - fhir_patient_db
Collection(table) - fhir_patient_db
Keys -
1. Email Address
2. Admission, Discharge dates
3. Problem List
4. Phone Number

11. Example Final Iteration

12. Email Side
● Basic Gmail server setup
● Email template
○ Decoupled from information
format (based on NewsItems
& EmailWriters)
○ Automatically adjusted item
layouts
○ Primary and secondary color
for simple theme

13. Overcome Challenges
● Flexible templating and styling
● FHIR documentation
● Querying the FHIR server
○ SNOMED, ICD codes
○ Patient ID retrieval
● Image Retrieval

14. Future Work
● Sorting the diagnosis based on sensitivity and severity, using natural language
processing (NLP) to factor in the emotions of the family member
● HIPAA compliant email server
● Attaching a well-labelled image that helps the common people to understand
the problem better
● Exploring other image sources (e.g., Google Search)
● Including video links in the newsletter to increase comprehensibility.
● This could also incorporate the future plans/decisions of the physicians like an
incoming lab tests to take, etc.

15. THANK YOU