Do you think my ICU will benefit from an electronic medical record system?
In many Hospitals, Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are the most technologically advanced areas since the Intensive Care physicians deal with a massive quantity of data and information, because of the critical status of their patients each day. An electronic medical record (EMR) is a computer-base patient record optimized to support ambulatory settings and ward activities. An EMR may provide the physician with all the necessary information clearly gathered and stored and satisfy the need for more direct integration of the different information. Even if the installation of an EMR is a positive signal of modernity, it may represent a useless investment with minor effects on the clinical staff improvement and on the risk reduction, because of mayor failures in the installation planning, integration in the hospital system, personnel education. Definitions, advantages and limitation, implementation strategies and objectives of an ICU EMR system are reviewed.
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Mediterranean Institute for Transplantations and High Specialized Therapies, Palermo, Italy. orpiazza@unina.it
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De Robertis
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Tufano
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D006801:Humans; D007362:Intensive Care Units; D019300:Medical Errors / Q000517:prevention & control; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized