Functionally, palliative care programs seek to monitor patients’ health status, track program development, generate patient reports, and aggregate data on the types of care provided. These tasks are more difficult as a result of variation in clinical workflow patterns across the three types of palliative care episodes: inpatient, outpatient, and home-based care (Figure  1). To achieve these design goals, the database should assign each patient

a unique identification number and provide a unified interface to monitor the patient’s demographic information and appointments. Further, the database should allow for differentiation between Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the features of distinct patient care episodes. Finally, the database ought to be able to automatically aggregate patient data; report on patient diagnoses, outcomes, and treatments; and track services and medications provided. DataPall was developed to meet these goals while targeting a streamlined user interface, minimizing Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical textual input,

and optimizing file size. Table 1 Palliative care EMR design criteria Figure 1 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Clinical workflow for palliative care in Malawi. Clinical workflow includes (A) outpatient, (B) inpatient, and (C) home-based care settings; red arrows indicate where patient episode is recorded. Use of DataPall DataPall was developed in order to: 1) organize administrative data; 2) create a patient registry; and 3) maintain and generate reports of clinical-level data. Prior to the implementation of the DataPall

EMR, recordkeeping at Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical both field sites was conducted using paper registers provided by the Malawi Ministry of Health. These registers only offered space to record a patient’s name, age, gender, address, diagnosis, and prescribed medication. DataPall is a dual-use Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical EMR that may be used as an administrative database (patient registry) and as a point-of-care records system meant to overcome the challenges that paper registers pose to medical recordkeeping and program evaluation. While data input to DataPall is stored in tables, the end-user does not directly interact with these tables themselves; rather, easy-to-use forms guide the user experience. A navigable interface consisting of selleck kinase inhibitor buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, drop-down menus, datasheets, and text fields define end-user interaction below (Figures  2, ​,33 and ​and4).4). The home screen allows for quick navigation to the various features of the database (Figure  2A). These features include: adding new patients; inputting data regarding community health workers, educational conferences or trainings; viewing records of previously entered data; searching for existing patients (Figure  2B- ​B-2D);2D); inputting and editing data regarding patient appointments in clinic and at home (Figure  3); and generating individual patient history reports and aggregate data for specific time periods (Figure  4). Figure 2 DataPall user interface. (A) The home screen.