Benefits and possible improvements of an anaesthesia information management system in a quality assurance programme

摘要

The efficiency of an anaesthesia quality assurance programme depends on many variables,1 including individual and collective staff contribution, commitment of quality management director, but also the choice of indicators and their availability to monitor adequately the programme.2 AIMS generates a huge amount of data which might be useful for this purpose;3 here we report multiple contributions of our AIMS system (Datex Ohmeda? and Archive Browser?) in some parts of our quality assurance programme from 2002 to 2010. The system which is integrated in the AS5 Dragger anesthesia machine? automatically records vital signs and ventilator parameters, while anaesthesia providers manually index drug administration and medical intervention or administrative tasks in the operating theatre and the post-anaesthetic care unit (PACU).