It was decided that electronic charting was going to be the primary data collection mechanism. To reduce distraction to the care provider, all physiologic parameters were to be machine transduced and printed onto the record and database. With this model, more physiologic data points were collected, and variances in sampling rates and transcription frequency became machine programmable rather than clinician dependent. Anesthesia care providers could move the electronic anesthesia record to a PACU workstation where the nurses would add on the electronic PACU record. Preoperative data have proven the most difficult to standardize and collect.
Patients enter the hospital system via several pathways.
Due to payer arrangements, roughly 50 percent of the O.R. patients have preoperative studies done in the hospital. Once the data collection process was streamlined and maximally automated, the process of information generation was developed to create standardized reports and the ability to create new queries. Standardized business queries including a daily list of patients and procedures used by administrators to track billing processes. Information Dissemination Getting the outcome information back to the individual care provider was a fundamental system design concept. Second, since the care providers change their clinical practices to comply with pathways that will affect cost, outcome and throughput, they needed believable information.