Anesthesiology requires constant monitoring of patient's vital signs, drugs given, etc. All the monitoring parameters, accompanying procedures, particular times and the people involved need to be precisely recorded. The end result is a paper report - Anesthesia Record - which is still, in most of today's hospitals, written by hand.

 

Initial situation

 

Our client wanted to develop a universal record application for several different hospitals. One must understand that there are no unique rules that define how the record should look like. A lot of hospitals tend to shape the record design based on their habits and scope of work, so in some cases, differences are considerable.

 

System description

 

Anesthesia Record is Web-based application which mimics the whole anesthesia monitoring workflow, including pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative phase and produces rich, neatly formatted record reports.

 

The main problem was to provide a system that would accommodate the majority of every client's specifics (a client is usually a group of anesthesiologists from one hospital). This is done via client-based templates, which give every client a possibility to partially customize the monitoring process and the end report appearance according to their preferences.

 

Another very important issue is the location where this application is supposed to be used. The majority of data should be entered in the OR (operating room), but the pre-operative data and post-operative data are entered at different locations. For example, the post-operative data is, in most of the cases, entered in the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit). Since data for the same case is entered from several different locations, some clients raised a question of constant doctor's mobility and requested a way to input a certain portion of the data using PDA devices. One must understand that this raises a lot of technical issues: for example, a wireless network must be properly set-up in the whole hospital; additionally, data entry operations on the PDA can be quite cumbersome. Nevertheless, we made the PDA extension available for such clients, although our recommendation is that a tablet PC should be used instead at all stages. Of course, a tablet still requires WiFi availablity, and is portable as PDA, but on the other hand, it's a much more powerful and flexible device for data entry.

 

Click on the image above to see full anesthesia record report in PDF format  

 

Technical details

 

Anesthesia Record application is developed using the Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 and related development tools (VS.NET 2003 & C#), and is running on MS Windows 2003 server and SQL Server 2000. Mobile portion of the application is developed via the ASP.NET Mobile Internet Toolkit. The end record report is developed using ActiveReports component and is available primarily in pdf, but also in tif and other formats.

 

Contact us for more info: info@mono-software.com.