What Particulars Are Referred to in Electronic Health Record Data? a Case Study in Integrating Referent Tracking Into an EHR Application

Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm the authors provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. The authors describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is based in order to allow integration efforts to be applied in similar ways to other EHR applications.