Project overview
UHS Lifelines was conceived by Mr Rew as a transformative approach to the visualisation and interaction with the Electronic Patient Record at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) on a single screen.
It uses subject taxonomy timelines and the iconographic representation of documents, events and reports on a unified, intuitive, adaptable and structurally coherent interface within the UHS Clinical Data Estate (CDE) on a single screen.
The structural concept was originally published by Professor Ben Sheniderman's team at the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of the University of Maryland in the mid 1990s, but not further developed into a practical system. We have been in regular contact with that team to appraise them of our work.
UHS Lifelines has evolved since 2009 from a simple idea into a core element of the UHS CDE through an agile and iterative partnership between David Rew, Alan Hales (Lead Programmer and UHS Systems Consultant) and David Cable, for the UHS IT Service.
When compared with all legacy computer interface formats, UHS Lifelines radically shortens and simplifies the time taken to assemble, interact with and navigate the complex and heterogenous data set that constitutes the EPR of each and every patient under the care of UHS, and it makes historic data as immediately accessible as current records, back to 1990.
Quite uniquely, the system has been adopted without commission or significant funding as a key element of the EPR or a major UK University Hospital in 2021, where it offers substantial productivity gains and risk mitigation when compared with legacy EPR formats.
An early iteration of the system received an NHS Regional Innovations Award in 2011. Since then, the team has resolved a range of conceptual and technical challenges to optimise the efficiency of the interface.
The system continues to undergo major software upgrades and continuing evolutionto integrate and distribute primary, social and hospital care records into a unitary interface for NHS use.
It uses subject taxonomy timelines and the iconographic representation of documents, events and reports on a unified, intuitive, adaptable and structurally coherent interface within the UHS Clinical Data Estate (CDE) on a single screen.
The structural concept was originally published by Professor Ben Sheniderman's team at the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of the University of Maryland in the mid 1990s, but not further developed into a practical system. We have been in regular contact with that team to appraise them of our work.
UHS Lifelines has evolved since 2009 from a simple idea into a core element of the UHS CDE through an agile and iterative partnership between David Rew, Alan Hales (Lead Programmer and UHS Systems Consultant) and David Cable, for the UHS IT Service.
When compared with all legacy computer interface formats, UHS Lifelines radically shortens and simplifies the time taken to assemble, interact with and navigate the complex and heterogenous data set that constitutes the EPR of each and every patient under the care of UHS, and it makes historic data as immediately accessible as current records, back to 1990.
Quite uniquely, the system has been adopted without commission or significant funding as a key element of the EPR or a major UK University Hospital in 2021, where it offers substantial productivity gains and risk mitigation when compared with legacy EPR formats.
An early iteration of the system received an NHS Regional Innovations Award in 2011. Since then, the team has resolved a range of conceptual and technical challenges to optimise the efficiency of the interface.
The system continues to undergo major software upgrades and continuing evolutionto integrate and distribute primary, social and hospital care records into a unitary interface for NHS use.