C. Dujat et al., OPTICAL ARCHIVING OF MEDICAL RECORDS IN-HOSPITAL INFORMATION-SYSTEMS - A PRACTICAL APPROACH TOWARDS THE COMPUTER-BASED PATIENT RECORD, Methods of information in medicine, 34(5), 1995, pp. 489-497
Citations number
25
Categorie Soggetti
Medicine Miscellaneus","Computer Science Information Systems","Medical Informatics
The large number of inpatients and outpatients in university hospitals
leads to high costs of medical documentation and to an increasing num
ber of medical documents. Due to legal regulations, these medical reco
rds have to be stored for 30 years. This implies spatial, organization
al, and economical problems. At present, conventional archiving in hos
pitals often does not satisfy the need to make medical records availab
le for healthcare professionals in a systematic and timely manner. Fro
m 1989 to 1993 a pilot study on ''digital optical archiving of medical
records'' was carried out at Heidelberg University Hospital. The stud
y has shown the feasibility of digital optical archiving in hospitals
if done under certain conditions. In 1995, Heidelberg University Hospi
tal adopted a procedure for ''digital optical archiving of medical rec
ords''. The digital optical archive will first be filled with the medi
cal records of the department of neurosurgery and the endoscopic and e
chographic images and reports of the department of internal medicine.
It is to be expected that this procedure will gradually lead to an int
egrated functionality on health-care professional workstations, to a h
ospital-wide use of an electronic patient record, and to media-indepen
dent document management systems. The paper focusses on the potentials
of digital optical archiving as an integral part of hospital informat
ion systems, and on the requirements for the systematic managements of
hospital information systems with respect to digital optical archives
.