The evolution of an integrated timeline for oncology patient healthcare.

The introduction of computers in the medical environment has contributed to the proliferation of medical data, often making it difficult to consolidate information on a single patient. In patients with complex medical problems, such as oncology patients, the lack of data integration can negatively impact on patient care. This paper presents an infrastructure for the creation of an integrated multimedia timeline that automatically combines patient information from distributed hospital information sources, and creates a visual summary of pertinent events in a patient's medical history. In this prototype, we focus on oncology patients under treatment for advanced cancers.