| Description |
The purpose of this thesis is to detail work that has been done to prototype a computer aided data collection, documentation, and decision-making systems for obstetrical medicine. Physicians and medical professionals are extremely busy people. Performance of their job depends on accurate and timely collection of vital pieces of data that they use to make decision concerning their patients. Several other people may use patient data, which a health professional collects. Therefore accurate and consistent documentation of data and decisions is a requirement. Progress has been made in establishing methods for consistent data collection and documentation of data and decisions, but inadequacies still exist. Specifically, the physician's charting system could benefit from a computer-supported system that would impose consistency in data collection and documentation while providing secondary support to the physician by using the data available in the system to make logically inferred decisions that would be available to the physician as a reference. During cart creation, documentation is done but often lacks consistency and completeness. Many physicians carry a great deal of patient specific data around in their heads. The ability to remember vast amounts of patient data is an excellent attribute. To enhance and to reduce the possibility of omitting pertinent and clinically applicable information, mechanisms for consistently collecting. Recording , and reporting patient data need to be developed and implemented. Further, in the event a patient were to see another physician the transfer of clinical information would be enhanced. The reason a physician collects data is to help himself/herself make decision concerning the patient's situation. The body of obstetrical knowledge has increased to the point where it is difficult for a physician to deal with all the data available and make all the correct decision. If a tool were available that could collect and analyze the data and derive logical decision, then the physician would be able to confirm his/her decisions, document the decision made and resolve any discrepancies that arise. For this thesis an Obstetrics Information Management System was prototyped. During the course of this project: (1) software to interface with patients, physicians, and physician's staff was created, tested and modified, (2) decision logic was tested and debugged, (3) and software to generate reports was created, tested, and modified. The prototyping process utilized data input by patients as well as input of data taken from actual patient charts to test the software's capabilities. The obstetricians involved took an active role in evaluating the prototype's progress. The prototype demonstrated (1) a complete application can be constructed in PAL (PTXT Application Language), (2) a real-time ask now query could be implemented that was capable of using computer-generated decisions as well as data from external sources, and (3) physicians want a computerized information system that will collect as much data as possible and provide decision support prior to the physician actually seeing the patient. In the 12 years since the original prototype was completed, the computing world has undergone significant changes. A recent study has documented that of 104 million adult (age 18 and older) Americans accessing the Internet 50.6 Internet 50.6 percent are women. The same study documented that73 percent of children (ages 17 through 12 inclusive) in the United States have Internet access. Other notable changes include the creation of open standards for working on the Internet such as XML, Java, HTML, HTTP, etc. Software such as web serves, servlet containers, java virtual machines, web browsers have been developed that are compliant with these standards and provide the infrastructure to use them. |
