The increasing diffusion of computer technology andtelecommunications has made the telemedicine approach, providing medicalinformation and services at a distance, a fundamental tool to harmonisequality and cost in the health system. While the most common use oftelemedicine has been, up to now, in the long distance links between thepatient and the physician, the object of this work is a hospitalapplication, in which both the technological and the management aspectshave been faced. Information technology allows the acceleration of theaccomplishment of the information processes, offering easy and quickprocedures to record, archive, process and search the desired data. Theward represents a complex organisation that requires the control ofdifferent kinds of data for the management of the personnel, of thepatients, of the clinical information. Only an effective management isable to guarantee a coordinate and integrated activity of the differentparts of the system: the more complex the organisation, the moreeffective has to be the informative system. Moreover, from themanagement point of view, only the availability of correct informationabout the work loads in the different units of the hospital makespossible an effective distribution of the human resources. All thesetargets may be achieved by introducing an Informative System. Thedeveloped Ward Informative System is composed of two main components:the hardware surveillance system, placed at the patient bed side, and acentral control station. The hardware surveillance system at the bedsite comprises a palm-top data logger based on an Hitachi 16 bits RISCmicrocontroller of the H8/500 family. The central control stationcomprises a Pentium PC and is connected to the ward beds and to theInstitute general archive, continuously monitoring the ward activity andexchanging desired data with the general archive. The developed systemhas shown several advantages for the activity of the physicians and ofthe nurses, supporting management in the hard effort to harmonise needsand resources
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