A team of students from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, calling themselves the Georgia Tech Flatliners, recently participated in, and took the first three prizes, at the National Health Information Network (NHIN) Code-a-thon Challenge held at Florida International University (FIU).  The Flatliners were enrolled in the Health Informatics class taught by HSI Associate Director, Mark Braunstein, MD, also a Professor of the Practice, in the College of Computing.

The event was co-hosted by FIU, Open Health Tools (OHT) – an open source community for Health IT and the American Academy of Family Physicians National Research Network.  Sponsored by Medicity, the GT Flatliners comprised Ph.D. student Klara Benda and master’s students Adrian Courreges, Monosij Dutta-Roy and Hassan Khan. The NHIN Challenge asked teams to create innovative stylesheets to display the information in a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) to a primary care physician taking calls from patients after office hours. The idea is to develop a CCD visualization tool that facilitates an efficient and effective phone consultation between the on-call doctor and an unfamiliar patient. Not only did the solutions have to interpret and display data error-free; they also had to facilitate the most efficient use of the physician’s time. The Flatliners, competing against professionals in the Health IT field, came up with the following solutions – a problem-based approach, a multi-context approach and a rapid-access approach:

• Problem Oriented Approach (winner): arranged the clinical data by problem so that the physician could hone in on relevant information to the particular problem the patient is presenting.
• Multi-Context Approach (second place): provided a highly flexible visual display that allows the physician to arrange information according to his or her particular "mental model" for handling a particular problem.
• Rapid Access Approach (third place): provided quick and easy direct navigation among all of the clinical areas in which data is stored in the CCD.