As the country moves toward implementing electronic health record systems, researchers have been working to develop an advanced search tool to help physicians sort and retrieve EMR data. A tool has been developed at Massachusetts General Hospital, called the Queriable Patient Inference Dossier (QPID), according to an article in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

Because physicians, and radiologists especially, have little prior familiarity with each patient's clinical situation, it can be challenging to navigate the EMR system efficiently, according to the researchers, especially due to time constraints.

"Time and effort required for search becomes a barrier to effective use of EMR, especially when clinicians are under time pressure or have limited familiarity with their patients," said developer Dr. Michael Zalis in an e-mail interview with DOTmed News. "The overall goal [of QPID] is quality and efficiency improvement."

Back in 2005, Mass General researchers started the development of QPID for their hospital's EMR system. The search tool acts like a medical intelligence system, combining the functions of a search engine with a programming system and a growing catalog of search modules and applications, Zalis said.

It was developed separately from the EMR and operates in a read-only fashion in relation to it, according to the report. This means that QPID does not input new EMR data; it just allows physicians to extract certain patterns of data, the researchers explained.

The key features include a power search engine that operates on the enterprise-wide EMR record of each patient. The search engine includes powerful natural language processing tools and is coupled to a programming system, so that complex search routines can quickly be built together and tied to things, including clinical service schedules and care unit census lists.

It is possible for QPID to integrate with other EMR systems, providing advanced search capabilities, Zalis said, but this depends on permissions and export capabilities.

QPID has more than 800 registered users and posts more than 10,000 pages of medical record information per day, Zalis said.

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