OPTICAL ARCHIVING OF MEDICAL RECORDS IN-HOSPITAL INFORMATION-SYSTEMS - A PRACTICAL APPROACH TOWARDS THE COMPUTER-BASED PATIENT RECORD

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 .