Decision Support by Visual Incidence Anamneses for Increased Patient Safety

1.1 How to get the right information? Decision support in Health Care is based on proper collection and evaluation of relevant information related to the patient and her/his medical history. In the process of Anamnesis the patient will provide individual testimony regarding her/his status in a dialogue with the physician. The diagnosis will then be conducted by complementing this information with written information from (electronic) Health Records (EHR) followed by clinical examination, laboratory testing and imaging. The quality and relevance of the information from Anamnesis is strongly dependant on the format and focus of the dialogue at hand. The dialogue itself is partly derived from analysing the patients EHR. As we know, the information found in EHRs is based on treatment of the patient by different hospital specialist departments. This structure of the EHR hampers the understanding of the treatment processes and their relevance in preparing the dialogue with the patient in the Anamnesis process. We argue in this chapter that tools supporting the Anamnesis Process, such as the Visual Incidence Anamneses (VIA), have potential to improve decision support and process transparency in diagnosing patients and hence increasing patient safety. The following two figures capture our main ideas. Figure 1 illustrates information collected by the physician at two separate anamnesis events. Situation N is the present situation. Situation N-1 refers to