Portable terminal for data input in a coronary care unit.

A new manual describes a data acquisition system for that is used in a Coronary Care Unit environment (CCU) This system is designed to provide a data entry mechanism of sufficient ease that the nursing staff of the CCU will enter clinical data required to supplement a medical decision making system (HELP) in use at the LDS Hospital. State of the art microprocessor technology was used in development of small portable bedside terminals (PBT's) to preprocess input data and provide an interfacing capability to a central computer facility. The project was designed in two parts: (1) Development of software required to translate coded input data to a dictionary defined coded data structure for storage in a patient medical data file; (2) concurrent construction and testing of portable bedside terminals and bedside display devices. Through testing and acceptance of this system still awaits use by the CCU nursing staff. The portable terminal, display device and the decoding/message translator software have been tested in a laboratory setting using actual CCU patient data. Additionally, a successful simulation of the new data collection schema has been performed in the CCU environment using an existing computer terminal (at the nurse's station.) It was found that the PBT system will capture all the data currently manually input by computer technicians. The PBT system will provide a new bedside interface for physician, nurse and patient with the medial database. Increased accuracy and timeliness of patient data captured from the "real time" manual data entry will improve the ability of a computer based decision-making system to provide assistance to physicians and nurses.