Emergency room psychiatric consultation data base

The University of Hawaii Affiliated Hospitals Residency Program supports The Queen's Medical Center Emergency Room (ER) by providing a resident physician for psychiatric consultation. In an effort to improve patient care, the residents are working with the hospital to computerize the psychiatric consult service to ease the problems of limited space in the ER for psychiatric examinations. Limited psychiatric office space, and time wasted walking back and forth from the nursing station are handicaps. This article will describe the current system and compare it with the system being developed. The ultimate goal is to make consultations more efficient by creating a data base of known patients, and by increasing the speed of evaluating and processing patients, thus reducing the amount of time a patient spends in the ER.