{"id":7747,"date":"2018-04-26T16:01:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T20:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/?p=7747"},"modified":"2024-07-08T06:05:57","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T10:05:57","slug":"emerse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigan.it.umich.edu\/news\/2018\/04\/26\/emerse\/","title":{"rendered":"EMERSE: Michigan Medicine’s powerful medical record search engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Any note or document that is written by a medical professional (like a doctor, pharmacist, nurse, or social worker)\u00a0is called free text, meaning anything goes\u2014from syntax errors to misspellings to abbreviations, and more. That\u2019s tough for a search engine to navigate. To get any information at all for things like research studies or billing information, users would have to click on every medical record. At Michigan Medicine, more than 2.3 million patients over the past 20 years have generated over 120 million medical care documents. So trying to find information was nearly impossible.<\/span><\/p>\n

How to solve the problem? EMERSE it. <\/strong><\/h1>\n

EMERSE, or the Electronic Medical Record Search Engine, is a tool for digging through notes in medical records that was first developed at U-M in 2005.\u00a0It is fast, powerful, and easy to use. EMERSE is also open-source, free, and accessible from any modern web browser…but don\u2019t let this mislead you into thinking it’s a lightweight, plug-and-play tool. EMERSE requires a dedicated clinical IT team to install and securely manage the system.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Used primarily by three groups\u2014clinicians, operational staff, and researchers\u2014EMERSE can help a clinician scour medical notes for details from past visits, eliminating the need to rely on memory<\/span>. Operational staff could, for example, use it for infection control surveillance or review billing to insurance companies.\u00a0Researchers can use EMERSE to find patients, for general data abstraction, or for a retrospective (i.e., how many cases of x<\/em> happened).<\/span><\/p>\n

More than 900 studies have made use of the EMERSE search engine, and about 120 publications have resulted from the studies.<\/p>\n

The team behind EMERSE<\/h1>\n

For the past ten years, thanks to the expertise of Michigan Medicine’s\u00a0<\/span>David Hanauer<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and a committed and talented Software Delivery team from <\/span>Health Information Technology & Services (HITS)<\/span>, users have been able to use the EMERSE search for what they need, when they need it.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThere are advantages to working with HITS\u2014it is a broad organization, and can easily tap into many different areas, including security, storage, and much more,\u201d Hanauer said. \u201cI feel fortunate to work with them.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The number of active users is growing. Hanauer recently received a grant from the National Cancer Institute to expand and disseminate the tool to other institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHITS software developers James Law, Ritu Khanna, and Raghu Tadi are at the core of the EMERSE development team. They are highly-experienced application developers who routinely make the complex design requests for EMERSE possible. They also collaborate with our business partners, including MICHR. The way they all work together is a true testament to the dedication and commitment they have for the project,\u201d said Bryan Martyn, HITS director\u2014Software Delivery.<\/span><\/p>\n

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