Open Source Clinical Data Search Engine – EMERSE at Michigan Medicine

David Hanauer, MD, MS, FACMI, Program Director of Clinical Research Informatics, Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research, Assistant Chief Medical Information Officer, and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Often the most detailed clinical data are trapped within the free text clinical notes, and these data are needed when the structured/coded data are inaccurate or incomplete. For more than a decade, the University of Michigan has been developing and using a free text search engine designed for clinical documents, called EMERSE (Electronic Medical Record Search Engine). EMERSE has been used to support a wide range of operational, clinical, and research tasks, resulting in improved operational efficiency, more powerful research, and even financial savings. With support from grants from the National Institutes of Health, Michigan Medicine is providing EMERSE at no cost to other institutions interested in adopting the software. The University of North Carolina is already providing EMERSE as a service to their users. EMERSE was designed for users with no technical expertise other than being able to use a search engine (like Google), and has been highly regarded and widely used. Dr. Hanauer describes use cases for EMERSE, implementation requirements, and provides a demonstration of its capabilities.