Abstract

While much research exists on aspects or phenomena related to or depending on structuring of infor-mation in the healthcare context, most of this has been limited to the study of specific Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementation, or to certain capabilities or functionalities of EHRs such as decision support, the narrative, and clinical classifications and terminology. The phenomenon of in-formation structuring in EHRs per se, has received little research attention. This article presents a review on the subject of information structuring in EHRs. While research shows that increasing struc-turing of health information may be favorable to healthcare, there are also caveats. This paper expos-es and discusses both salient drivers and barriers described by the literature, by examining the phe-nomenon through seven identified themes: clinical decision support; competence; continuity of care; management; secondary uses; patient safety and quality of care; and patient empowerment. Even though increased use of structured health data (depending on context) has the potential to cause ma-jor impacts to healthcare, a middle path represented by the synergistic co-existence of both structured data and unstructured information seems to be the most feasible to follow for healthcare at the time being based on the available literature.

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