Nonconfidential Patient Types in Emergency Clinical Decision Support

Simple tools are needed to support differential diagnosis in a cognitively complex setting. Tools that show similar patients' diagnoses and treatment trajectories might provide useful clinical decision support for emergency physicians who use a case-based reasoning approach. However, privacy concerns that arise with indirect use of electronic health records (EHRs) must be addressed. The authors present a method to abstract a collection of EHRs into a set of summarized patient types and demonstrate its use on a database of medical records.