Web of Active Documents: an Architecture for Flexible Electronic Patient Records

In this paper, we present the WOAD architecture, a design-oriented architecture that allows to build modular and flexible Electronic Patient Record (EPR) based on the metaphor of Active Document. An Active Document is an electronic document that users can easily built by aggregating smaller data modules, called didgets, to mimic their paper-based templates and provide them with proactive behaviors in support of daily practice. After presenting the basic elements of WOAD (i.e., datoms, didgets, templates and mechanisms), we summarize the observational studies that inspired the development of ProDoc, our first WOAD-compliant EPR, and that gave us preliminary user feedbacks for validation. We then illustrate the core implementation details of the WOAD architecture, as it has been deployed in ProDoc