Hospital Information System

Based on their corporate experience in supporting their own research and development projects as well as a number of government-sponsored activities, the development of scientific software at BBN grew out of a long history of support of a variety of scientific applications. For example, in the 1960 s, BBN developed a hospital information system for Massachusetts General Hospital which used an early minicomputer, the PDP-1, to support clinical research activities. Under the sponsorship of the National Institutes of Health, they developed a system called PROPHET (1) which provides a... 

Classen DC, Pestotnik SL, Evans RS, Burke JP. Description of a computerized adverse drug event monitor using a hospital information system. Hosp Pharm 1992 27 774, 776-9, 783. 

Pestotnik SL, Classen DC, Evans RS, Stevens LE, Burke JP. Prospective surveillance of imipenem/cilastatin use and associated seizures using a hospital information system. Ann Pharmacother 1993 27(4) 497-501. 

Unmanned satellite laboratories are a possible alternative to a central laboratory facility. To demonstrate the practicality of such an approach, investigators at the University of Virginia have developed remote automated laboratory systems- (RALS) designed to automate POCT in hospital intensive care units. The results from the analytical instruments in each RALS are sent to a central monitoring workstation several floors away from the satellite laboratory by a network interface, where results are viewed and either accepted or rejected by a trained medical technologist before being released for clinical use. Error codes built into the analytical instruments are also passed to the main laboratory by the computer netw ork. Technologists in the control center can also shut down the satellite laboratory when necessary, as in the case of instrument failure. Patient information is downloaded from the hospital information system in real time so that users can select their patients and the tests to perform from a fist presented on the computer touchscreen. 

The documentation of all aspects of a POCT service has been a major issue for many years, compounded by the fact that often the storage of data in laboratory and hospital information systems has been limited and often inconsistent. Thus it is critically important to keep an accurate record of the test request, the result, and the action taken as an absolute minimum. Some of the issues concerning documentation are now being resolved with the advent of the patient electronic record, electronic requesting, and better connectivity of POCT instrumentation to information systems and the patient record (see earlier discussion). The... 

J. Dudeck. 1997. New technologies in hospital information systems. Amsterdam I OS Press. 

For our discussion, distinction between HIS (Hospital Information System), RIS (Radiology Information System) and EMR (Electronic Medical Record) is usually immaterial, and so we either use a general term or choose the one that happens to be most convenient. 

Ability to interface with a large number of hospital information systems. 

GNU Health is a centralized and scalable system oriented toward hospital infrastructure, including EHR support, a hospital information system, and a health information system. Jamaica is the first country that adopted GNU Health in the entire health system of the nation [22]. 

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