The development and implementation of an electronic medical folder.

摘要

The delivery of health care has experienced a paradigm shift from an individual health care perspective to community focused care. There is a growing realization that the use of information technology is needed to increase efficiency, enhance decision making and enable changes that would improve the health care delivery system. This is a case study of an international employer's strategic plan to use information technology to re-engineer the delivery of their occupational health services (OHS) through the development of an electronic medical folder (EMF). This was accomplished with a client server distributed system across the U.S. using IBM's Image Plus VisualInfo software. The infrastructure utilizes the company's network with five Library Servers, fourteen Object Servers and three optical jukeboxes. This configuration stores four million images in a document management system used by 100 OHS staff nationally. EMF has provided many benefits including: improved health care through collaborative decision making by accessibility of records nationwide, retrospective data analysis, and enhanced security. This achievement has allowed us to abandon the paper medical record and will position us to utilize advanced technology as it evolves.