Streaming Virtual Patient Records

Clinical record integration and visualization is one of the most important abilities of modern health information systems (HIS). Its use on clinical encounters plays a relevant role in the efficacy and efficiency of healthcare. However, the amount of data currently being produced, stored and used in hospital settings is stressing information technology infrastructure; integrated HIS of central hospitals may gather millions of clinical documents. One solution is to consider a virtual patient record (VPR), created by integrating all clinical records, which must collect documents from distributed departmental HIS. Our vision is that the problem is better modeled in the distributed streaming data paradigm, since distributed streams of documents are produced in the entire hospital, which are to be collected by the VPR, which has then to process and manage the corresponding centralized stream of documents.