  Clinical documentation can be transformed by Electronic Health Records, yet
the documentation process is still a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone
process. Clinicians are faced with multi-faceted requirements and fragmented
interfaces for information exploration and documentation. These challenges are
only exacerbated in the Emergency Department -- clinicians often see 35
patients in one shift, during which they have to synthesize an often previously
unknown patient's medical records in order to reach a tailored diagnosis and
treatment plan. To better support this information synthesis, clinical
documentation tools must enable rapid contextual access to the patient's
medical record. MedKnowts is an integrated note-taking editor and information
retrieval system which unifies the documentation and search process and
provides concise synthesized concept-oriented slices of the patient's medical
record. MedKnowts automatically captures structured data while still allowing
users the flexibility of natural language. MedKnowts leverages this structure
to enable easier parsing of long notes, auto-populated text, and proactive
information retrieval, easing the documentation burden.
