PDMS

A Neonatal Care Unit (NICU) is a data-rich environment. An information overload can be observed at point-of-care and hospital enterprise level. Errors may occur just because of the sheer volume of data. The implementation of healthcare information technologies (HIT) can help to enhance the safety, quality and patient-centeredness of care.

Patient data management systems (PDMS) are especially designed software and hardware products for the documentation of patient's condition and treatment at intensive care. These routinely used systems must capture and store the abundance of information generated during the critical care process. Additional, a growing number of quality management systems (QMS) are implemented to provide clinical decision support, computerized physician order entry, rule-based infection monitoring, external quality control, and others. QMS applications and linkages in and among HIT systems can improve patient safety substantial. Communication tasks and asynchronous data exchange between HIT systems are important. Most HIT systems used at the introduced NICU provide rudimentary data exchange functions, but their data structures are optimized to applications requirements. The data stored at the PDMS database should be used for the QMS application to prevent multiple documentations. Frequent changes of the patient documentation process, subsequent data corrections, and missing essential patient information cause severe problems for data retrieval. A concept of data export - from actual used PDMS databases - is presented to handle such problems. The solution concept provides calculations, aggregation rules, and export adaptation functionalities. Patient data must be transformed to clearly defined information records for the QMS. The concept evaluation describes success, development process, operating time, customizations, and user satisfaction for implemented projects. It shows the importance of communication mechanisms between PDMS and QMS users. The integration of QMS applications into medical workflow is complex and elaborate methods for data and information exchange are required.