Electronic Admission and Discharge forms

[emmbit]

Hey there, I am a yr 3 student in New Zealand untertaking my Infomatics paper at present. I need to do an assignment, I was thinking as a topic I would do the advantages of using Electronic Admission and Discharge forms. I see many, the cost of paper and postage alone would be an incentive to save money by using this.

Is there anyone out there who uses Electronic Admission and Discharge forms, and if so are you able to give me some feed back to back up my argument for implementing them

Thanks

Mark

[rninformatics, DNP, RN]

Maybe you are thinking about implementing these forms in a public health or home health environment and not in the inpatient/acute care hospital setting? I am not sure as you did not say. In either case flat 'forms' without at the minimum a simple relational database program would be extremly limiting.

Related to acute care you would have major problems. Computerizing (or as you wrote: "electronic admit and D/C forms") individual forms (as apposed to a form/screen/table within a universally accessible relational database) have limitations and drawbacks.

You would not be able to retrieve, trend or query data from a flat form. If you wanted to go back historically and see how many patients were admitted with this or that Dx., how many patients were admitted that live in this or that zip code, what was the length of stay? - short of having to pull and manually read each admit/D/C form.

Where would you store the electronic forms once completed so that all appropriate care team members could access it when and if needed at a later date?

Data accuracy and security would also be an issue related to incorrectly keyed medical record numbers, social security numbers, DOBs etc.

Hey there, I am a yr 3 student in New Zealand untertaking my Infomatics paper at present. I need to do an assignment, I was thinking as a topic I would do the advantages of using Electronic Admission and Discharge forms. I see many, the cost of paper and postage alone would be an incentive to save money by using this.

Is there anyone out there who uses Electronic Admission and Discharge forms, and if so are you able to give me some feed back to back up my argument for implementing them

Thanks

Mark