The recommender system for a cloud-based electronic medical record system for regional clinics and health centers in China

Electronic medical record (EMR) system has become increasingly more important in developed countries due to its convenience and efficiency in medical information storage, management and analysis. However, one of the main limitations of EMR lies in that the clinical data for patients cannot be exchanged among different medical institutions. Recently, the cloud-based clinic system, featuring in lower cost and stronger functionality in data integration, has gained more and more attention. The cloud-based clinic system fulfills the requirement of “big data”, allowing higher efficiency and accuracy in data mining and analysis which may significantly improve the medical care and management. In this study, we propose a cloud-based EMR system integrated with recommender functionality. The recommender system features in both drug recommendation and decision support in diagnosis. In this paper, experiments to test ranking of recommended drugs and the auxiliary diagnosis support are presented. Results demonstrated good performance for both tests. In the future, the clinical decision support in diagnosis will be further improved with the knowledge from the professional medical providers.