Abstract:
The large number of inpatients and outpatients in university hospitals leads to high
costs of medical documentation and to an increasing number of medical documents. Due
to legal regulations, these medical records have to be stored for 30 years. This implies
spatial, organizational, and economical problems. At present, conventional archiving
in hospitals often does not satisfy the need to make medical records available for
healthcare professionals in a systematic and timely manner. From 1989 to 1993 a pilot
study on “digital optical archiving of medical records” was carried out at Heidelberg
University Hospital. The study has shown the feasibility of digital optical archiving
in hospitals if done under certain conditions. In 1995, Heidelberg University Hospital
adopted a procedure for“ digital optical archiving of medical records”. The digital
optical archive will first be filled with the medical records of the department of
neurosurgery and the endoscopic and echographic images and reports of the department
of internal medicine. It is to be expected that this procedure will gradually lead
to an integrated functionality on health-care professional workstations, to a hospital-wide
use of an electronic patient record, and to media-independent document management
systems. The paper focusses on the potentials of digital optical archiving as an integral
part of hospital information systems, and on the requirements for the systematic managements
of hospital information systems with respect to digital optical archives.
Keywords:
Hospital Information Systems - Computer-based Patient Records - Medical Records -
Archives - Digital Optical Archiving