Obstetric Information System: effectiveness in health care practice

摘要

The use of specific information systems is nowadays a great advantage in health care practice. Our work focuses on an Obstetric Information System named VCObsCare. This system is used by all health care professionals of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Sao Joao Hospital Center, Oporto, Portugal. This system's users consider it essential for performing their functions and also consider that it brings great advantage as it gathers in a single record, all the pregnancy's information. Nevertheless, Sao Joao Hospital Center has a wide variety of applications. In addition to the departmental applications, such as VCObsCare, there are various transversal applications that are common to all services of the hospital and with which VCObsCare does not fully interoperate. Because of this, professionals are often forced to replicate information, increasing the time spent on outpatient encounters. Our aim is to describe the tasks performed by the healthcare professionals on the software applications at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of Sao Joao Hospital Center and identify the time spent on information register activities in order to overcome system's limitations and consequently identify improvement opportunities. Our investigation was divided in two distinct phases: i) Analyze the archived records of a hospitalization episode in order to produce a sequence diagram, showing all the actors and all the systems involved in this process and showing evidence of interoperability between applications; ii) Make a real-time observation of its use by physicians through face contact in the doctor's office. This observation was done during approximately 4 hours. All interactions with the software applications were timed, indicating the duration of each task, as well as all interactions made with the transversal information systems. We have been able to identify that 24% of the time on outpatient encounters is spent on data replication and 55% of the time is spent on data registration on the multiple applications. Due to these results, we conclude that this time could be reduced by creating interoperability between VCObscare and the other systems.