Medical Blog

Computers and Health

The hospital's primary mission is to treat patients. The hospital is a complex structure involving several types of units: health care, administrative services, medical technology, pharmaceuticals, services logistics. Each of these units has distinct functions and has a certain autonomy, but the hospital may not operate properly if there is communication and cooperation between these units to best to treat patients.
Care Unit, the main host site for patients, is where converge all actions arising from therapeutic strategy. It's health care team who care unit responsible for implementation this strategy. The nursing unit should be considered the heart of the Hospital. To discuss what could be the major functions of a management system care unit, it is necessary to define the context and clarify the issues.

1.1 The hospital today

The hospital is worried

Recent social movements have clearly expressed that this is a deep malaise. This discomfort is the result of Many factors sometimes contradictory

• The weight of our culture:

In hospitals, three different worlds: that of the administration, that of the doctors and paramedics.
These worlds communicate poorly with one another. Their relationship is archaic. In teaching hospitals university, place of training future doctors, this malaise is compounded by reports that vague and outdated between the hospital (place of care) and the University (in charge of teaching and research).

• Medical knowledge explodes:

Techniques appear more sophisticated. Medicine today requires very heavy
technical platforms, and yet it is necessary to control health spending. More than ever, "we must
avoid unnecessary expenses that must be avoided so that the community can benefit from the gains productivity induced by technological advances. How to control these costs if we do in site assessment tools for each objective to justify and clearly assess its activity?

• The requirement of patients:

The requirement of patients who become customers, is growing even as the market protected hospitals tend to disappear with the emergence of powerful private and competitive structures and approach the general European market.

The hospital needs to change

"If the hospital of tomorrow looks like today, we are heading for disaster". The hospital must decompartmentalize: from inside and outwards and medicine vine.

Four main objectives can be defined:

• refocusing services around the patient,
• promote real dialogue between the various hospital occupations,
• better involve the entire nursing staff at the school management and its prospects evolution,
• conduct regular assessments of the various modes of organization chosen.

For teaching hospitals, it is urgent to redefine the relationship between hospitals and universities so that the three missions (Care, teaching, research) are better integrated, so that the status of doctors is more appropriate to reality, so that the funding of these missions is more clearly defined.

It is through the transformation of the nursing unit that passes the hospital reform Develop a management tool care unit, improving the quality of all services rendered patient satisfaction while providing physicians, paramedics, managers is a crossing point mandatory changes in the hospital.

1.2 The day care unit

"The care unit is a unit of place is developed a therapeutic strategy (for the sick) implemented by a health care team, defined as a responsibility, by consuming resources and internal external and may provide benefits to other units. This definition shows that the unit care is a complex structure.
There are virtually no studies describing a whole what care unit and how it work. The approach of the ward was almost always fragmentary. Even the teams that are Interested in the hospital information system as a whole have generally stopped at the gates of care unit, was only interested in aspects of communication between the ward and other areas of the hospital.

1.2.1 The role of doctors in the ward

Their role is clearly essential since it is the doctors who are responsible for developing strategies
diagnostic and therapeutic. The relationship between medicine and information in hospital practice, have been many studies. This work may be some lessons learned.

The organization of medical records is complex. It must however be distinguished:

• The file also includes the minimum patient identification, clinical information of the synthesis
more often coded to characterize the type of stay, conditions diagnosed, treatments implemented, the output modality of the patient and how the monitoring of this patient will be made.
This record minimum, although existing in different forms, is found almost constantly in care units. Chaired by F. Roger, a European commission has clarified the content. His Routine Use is a reality, as recently shown a comprehensive study done on all the services of a hospital university hospital in Paris.

• The record of expertise: the issue is him very specific unit of care. There is great variability
in its content and how it is used. Without doubt this is because of this part of the record that
may appear, at first glance, there is no common practice among the various units care. Wanting to find a common model today is utopian. The integration of expert systems and knowledge bases in clinical settings must be analyzed. Well the last 20 years the medical field was an ideal place for research system development experts, one must admit today that the daily routine use of these new policy tools remains very low.
The relationship between doctors and paramedics have rarely been well studied. The paramedics
often a sense of ownership of the patient by the doctor and feel excluded from the processes of care.