The software described in this paper, the Health Electronic Record Modeling Tool (HERMT), is a tiny piece of the electronic health records (EHRs) puzzle. What makes EHRs a puzzle is that everyone agrees that electronic patient records are a really great idea, but no one is willing to create them. As the author points out, the use of EHRs in the US is a tiny seven percent. Hospitals may use EHRs, but small clinics and solo practices, which make up 40 percent of US medical services, do not. The reason is that creating EHRs requires physician time.
What HERMT does is track user interaction with a Web application. The reason this is important, the author says, is that EHRs do not save time or money if there are no workflow changes. Ergo, HERMT was created to monitor workflow via a Web application or Web page.
HERMT monitors time spent on a page, including idle time; all pages seen by the user; the user’s name and Internet protocol (IP) address; and data input in fields. It also lets the user export the data files in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Excel format, for further analysis.
If you need to analyze workflows related to EHRs, Henrard’s approach may be helpful. But, although the tool was developed under the aegis of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it doesn’t seem to be available there. A similar tool, WebVIP, is available, however (see http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/WebTools/tech.html).