Provide support for ad hoc query and report generation using tools internal or external to the system. Present customized views and summarized information from a patient's comprehensive EHR subject to jurisdictional laws and organizational policies related to privacy and confidentiality. The view may be arranged chronologically, by problem, or other parameters, and may be filtered or sorted.

Providers and administrators need to respond quickly to new requirements for data measurement and analysis. This need may result from new regulatory requirements or internal requirements. This need also requires that users be able to define and retain their own query parameters. The data being queried may be in either structured or unstructured data formats.

Providers and administrators also need to query for the absence of specific clinical or administrative data. For example, the Quality Control department may desire to determine the level of adherence to the Diabetes Mellitus management protocol. If the protocol calls for the capture of fasting blood sugars information every 3 months at minimum, the investigator might need to perform a multi-patient query that identifies diabetic patients who do not show a Fasting Blood Sugar result within the last 3 months. Key time-related Emergency Department benchmarking reports include: arrival time; entrance-to-treatment-area time, doctor-to-patient contact time; decision-to-admit time, discharge or transfer time; and departure (from the Emergency Department) time. Important time intervals include, but are not limited to, the "door-to-doctor time", "doctor-to-dictation time", "admission to bed availability or departure", and overall length of stay.

A key feature of an electronic health record is its ability to support the delivery of care by enabling prior information to be found and meaningfully displayed. EHR systems should facilitate search, filtering (e.g., filtering by key word, tagged data, or diagnosis), summarization, and presentation of available data needed for patient care. Systems should enable views to be customized (e.g., specific data may be organized chronologically, by clinical category, or by consultant). The views may be arranged chronologically, by problem, or by other parameters, and may be filtered or sorted. Jurisdictional laws and organizational policies that prohibit certain users from accessing certain patient information must be supported.