Emergency Medicine Informatics: Information Management and Applications In the 21st Century (original) (raw)

Prehospital care is often defined as the connection between public safety, healthcare and public REVIEW ARTICLE Emergency Medicine Informatics (EMI) is the collection, management, processing, and application of emergency patient care and operational data. EMI is transforming and improving our prehospital care systems and emergency department (ED) operations, is critical for public health surveillance, and will enable us to expand clinical research in our institutions, regions, and nations. EMI is one of our most important tools for improving emergency care and positively impacting the health of the public. For prehospital care, EMI systems provide information to analyze the cost-effectiveness of clinical interventions, to organize EMS operations, to coordinate communication for service requests, to monitor quality control and educational needs, and to track patient outcomes. The practice of emergency medicine in the ED requires the capture of many data and time elements so that ED care is efficient. EMI modules support triage acuity and tracking, patient tracking, nurse and physician charting, clinical decision support, order entry, and discharge instructions and prescription generation. There must be coordination of the EMI with hospital, laboratory, and radiology reporting systems, and access to hospital and ambulatory clinic records. Clinical information should be aggregated into an ED Database which can then be used for clinical investigation. The cooperation and support of the hospital information services department, hospital administration, emergency medicine physicians, and emergency medicine researchers, is necessary so that the ED database will be well constructed, and most importantly, well used to improve patient care. Because the information from aggregated ED databases provides population-based information about acute illness and injury, ED databases are now one of the key elements of public health surveillance. An effective syndromic surveillance system based upon ED Chief Complaint (CC), nursing triage note, and ICD-9 or-10 CM codes requires the cooperation of hospital information systems professionals, hospital administrators, ED directors, and public health professionals. [Emergencias 2009;21:354-361]