Bruce Jackson's Blog

As I mentioned in my last post, Search has become the de facto way to quickly locate an item buried in the network sea – either on the Internet or on corporate networks. Given the complexity of Health Care data and terms along with the various taxonomies spread across disease and treatment types, an effective search across medical data can be very difficult to achieve. Full-Text-Search support in database technologies is one small step to help facilitate search, but in healthcare, we need more.

Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 has features that make it a powerful platform to develop solutions to help clinicians organize, store, and easily locate health data. A rather technical overview from Infosys will help the reader dig deeper.

For this post, let me highlight the platform features I think are most compelling for health data.

1. The audit regulations in the US Healthcare laws are often difficult to achieve; that is, “who saw what and when?” SharePoint includes powerful auditing and reporting capabilities out of the box that are an excellent adjunct to the rather simple user administration tools also included. As a full time developer of clinical data systems, this one feature would save me an enormous amount of time.

2. SharePoint includes what they call “Deep Refiners” that include counts. In other words, it is relatively easy to apply a filter (what they call “refiner”) to a search set and to quickly see how that would impact the search results. Try the Financial Times web site to get a sense for how this works.

3. When I installed the “free” version of SharePoint 2010, the Foundation version, I saw that it installed the Microsoft Speech Engine and APIs. I wondered about this and found that this was included so that SharePoint Search would include phonetic results for people searches. A search for Geoff should return Jeff as well. Cool.

4. Click-Through-Relevancy is something that I believe Google pioneered that is included in SharePoint Search. Each time a search result is clicked, its ranking increases so that in future similar searches, it will be correctly ranked and position in the displayed results.

5. Search can be “contextual” so that different results and refinements can be based on the users’ roles or profiles. This is powerful in healthcare where we might tune contextual search parameters for given specialty such as endocrinology.

6. Search is not limited to data stored in the SharePoint database. It can also search in the file system and can open TIFF or PDF files, run Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) on the image(s) and then index those images so that their textual equivalents can be included in the search results.

7. And my favorite feature is the metadata and taxonomy searches. These can be configured at the Enterprise level for all users; at the group level for a department or practice, and at the user level so a clinician can “tag” a document so it is very fast to locate later. Plus, these tags show up in the Search results. For example, if you create a tag with “swine flu” and attach it to images of discharge summaries. Later you can use the tag to narrow your search; or, if you search using some other metric, “swine flu” will show up as a refinement variable so you can filter or refine the results with just that term.

I look forward to our roll-out of SharePoint at our hospital and to explore more deeply how we might develop the platform to allow our Clinicians to more quickly find what they need to deliver better care.