Affiliations: Pulmonary Division and Division of Medical Informatics, Department of Medicine, University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Konrad E. Bloch, M.D., Pulmonary Division, University Hospital of Zurich, Rämistr. 100, CH 8091 Zurich, Switzerland. Tel. +41 1 255 3828; Fax: +41 1 255 4451; E-mail: pneubloc@usz.unizh.ch.
Abstract: Hospital-wide information systems may provide economical solutions for communication processes or for documentation by means of centralized digital medical records. Within a large university hospital, however, there may be too many diverse subspecialties and too many special medical procedures to be supported comprehensively by a single database information system. A peripheral modular system has been tailored to the specific needs of a sleep disorder clinic as an adjunct to the main clinical information system. The client server application allows for automatic data acquisition by on-line devices and by a graphical user interface. It supports administrative tasks for patient management, specific encounter interactions and data retrieval for research. Performance and acceptance of the system was assessed during clinical use, revealing positive response by the users, also with respect to significant time savings. Our experience suggests that the concept of peripheral database modules as “satellites” to a main clinical system provides flexibility in design and implementation of the specialized databases while providing access to data of more general relevance via the main database.
