Spatial Computing Opportunities in Biomedical Decision Support: The Atlas-EHR Vision

Consider the problem of reducing the time needed by healthcare professionals to understand patient medical history via the next generation of biomedical decision support. This problem is societally important because it has the potential to improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes. However, it is challenging due to the high patient-doctor ratio, the potential long medical histories, the urgency of treatment for some medical conditions, and patient variability. The current system provides a longitudinal view of patient medical history, which is time-consuming to browse, and doctors often need to engage nurses, residents, and others for initial analysis. To overcome this limitation, our vision, Atlas EHR, is an alternative spatial representation of patients' histories (e.g., electronic health records (EHRs)) and other biomedical data. Just like Google Maps allows a global, national, regional, and local view, the Atlas-EHR may start with the overview of the patient's anatomy and history before drilling down to spatially anatomical sub-systems, their individual components, or sub-components. It will also use thoughtful cartography (e.g., urgency color, disease icons, and symbols) to highlight critical information for improving task efficiency and decision quality, analogous to how it is used in designing task-specific maps. Atlas-EHR presents a compelling opportunity for spatial computing since health is almost a fifth of the US economy. However, the traditional spatial computing designed for geographic use cases (e.g., navigation, land survey, mapping) faces many hurdles in the biomedical domain, presenting several research questions. This paper presents some open research questions under this theme in broad areas of spatial computing.