Better EHR

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) funded four Strategic Health information technology Advanced Research Projects in 2010. Better known as SHARP, the goal was improving the use of information technology in healthcare.


One of the projects was called SHARPC, which studied patient-centered cognitive support—the idea that information technology should support physicians' reasoning and decision-making while using electronic health records (EHR) systems.


SHARPC was a collaboration of eleven academic medical institutions and health researchers. The effort was led by The University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston, which created the National Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making in Healthcare. 


This book documents the results of SHARPC's research: new theoretical frameworks, better ways of designing EHR systems, and new tools for implementing health information technology.