Medinfo. MEDINFO
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With the rapidly changing health care environment and information technology advances, organizations need to engage in strategic, planned change in order to allocate limited resources, achieve the organization's goals, and fulfill its mission [1]. One of the most important aspects of the organization's planned strategies for change concerns the information systems. The involvement of the nursing department in this process is critical. ⋯ The business plan is used to communicate the information system's needs to the administration and governing board of the organization. With a good information systems strategy, nursing will be prepared to make more timely and better informed decisions related to applying information technology within the nursing department. The end results of this planning should be evident in the improved utilization of information technology to support the nursing vision and mission.
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To create a clinical data repository to interface the Veteran's Administration (VA) Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) and a departmental clinical information system for the management of HIV patients. This system supports record-keeping, decision-making, reporting, and analysis. The database development was designed to overcome two impediments to successful implementations of clinical databases: (i) lack of a standard reference data model, and; (ii) lack of a universal standard for medical concept representation. ⋯ We obtained a suite of programs for implementing the HL7 encoding rules from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, written in ANSI C. This toolkit isolates our application programs from the details of the HL7 encoding rules, and allows them to deal with abstract messages and the programming level. While HL7 has become a standard for healthcare message exchange, SQL (Structured Query Language) is the standard for database definition, data manipulation, and query. The target database (Stitt F.W. The Problem-Oriented Medical Synopsis: a patient-centered clinical information system. Proc 17 SCAMC. 1993:88-93) provides clinical workstation functionality. Medical concepts are encoded using a preferred terminology derived from over 15 sources that include the Unified Medical Language System and SNOMed International ( Stitt F.W. The Problem-Oriented Medical Synopsis: coding, indexing, and classification sub-model. Proc 18 SCAMC, 1994: in press). The databases were modeled using the Information Engineering CASE tools, and were written using relational database utilities, including embedded SQL in C (ESQL/C). We linked ESQL/C programs to the HL7 toolkit to allow data to be inserted, deleted, or updated, under transaction control. A graphical format will be used to display the entity-rel
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SIDOCI (Système Informatisé de DOnnées Cliniques Intégrées) is a Canadian joint venture introducing newly-operating paradigms into hospitals. The main goal of SIDOCI is to maintain the quality of care in todayUs tightening economy. SIDOCI is a fully integrated paperless patient-care system which automates and links all information about a patient. ⋯ In addition, functions inherent to a patient's clinical cycle such as Administrative Management of episodes, Adaptation to physical and professional structures of the hospital, Messages between health professionals, and Electronic signature constitute the basis of SIDOCI. The most exciting aspect of this research project is its social impact: a more efficient health care system will improve the lives of all citizens. Moreover this applied research project involves the information industry and directly calls for the input of users such as doctors, nurses and hospital support staff.
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One of the major administrative dilemmas facing the Australian national health care system is the need to reform practices associated with massive data-information overload. The current system is burdened with paper-based administrative forms, patient record files, referral notes and other manual methods of data organisation. An integrated computer-based information system may be perceived as an attractive solution to such burdens. ⋯ Australia needs to develop a coherent national health information infrastructure policy to ultimately avoid fragmented, duplicated and incompatible systems that rely on different standards and protocols. Such a policy will only work by addressing the key issue of patient privacy within a technological framework. The application of IT to health care systems is a sensitive social experiment affecting many professions including general practitioners, medical administrators, politicians, lawyers, computer specialists, privacy advocates and patients whose records will ultimately reside in the system. (abstract trun
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1. BACKGROUND. The goal of the PEN&PAD (Elderly Care) project is to develop a patient record system to assist the many different professionals that care for patients in a hospital setting. ⋯ Thereafter, the file becomes read-only. We are currently putting a prototype clerking system through field trials with clinicians from of a local hospital. In our demonstration, we hope to elaborate on these trials and their outcomes.