UF/Shands initiated an electronic medical record project after recognizing that the existing Hospital Information System largely ignored the collection of clinical information. The available clinical information was stored in disparate systems making it cumbersome for the user to acquire information and virtually impossible for the clinical user to electronically assess the patient status.
The EMR project, dubbed the OnLine Medical Record (OLMR), attempted to resolve the most basic issues: collect electronically available information in a central database repository, present the information to the user in a meaningful way, and make the information available everywhere. To accomplish these basic goals, many technical challenges needed to be resolved, including database selection & location, system to system communication, standardization of data collection, and distributed printing.
Three years after the implementation of OLMR at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida, we have broad acceptance by both the clinical and administrative user community. There have been many expected and unexpected benefits of electronic patient information. We continue to work on completing the clinical repository, ensuring security/confidentiality in an EMR, and improving the delivery of clinical information.