Patient data management systems in anaesthesia: an emerging technology

The purpose of this review is to define the expectations of an on-line automatic patient data management system (PDMS) into anaesthesia work-stations in and around the operating room suite. These expectations are based on review of available information in the medical literature, and trials of several systems that are available commercially, three of them in a more detailed fashion (i.e. Informatics, Datex and North American Drager). The ideal PDMS should: -- communicate with and capture the information from different monitors, anaesthesia machines and electronic gadgets (e.g., infusion pumps) used in the operating room (OR), while presenting selected relevant values and trends on a screen. -- inform the anaesthetist of deviations from preselected limits of physiological and technical values. In the future, the system will hopefully be upgraded to include an algorithm-based decision support system. -- communicate with the hospital mainframe computer, and automatically transfer demographic data, laboratory and imaging results, and records obtained during preoperative consultations. -- at the end of each anaesthetic procedure, create an anaesthetic record with relevant data automatically collected by the system, as well as that which was entered manually by the physician during the procedure. A copy of this anaesthesia file must be kept on a computerized archive system. None of the systems so far evaluated fulfilled all our expectations. We have therefore adopted approach for the gradual introduction of such a system into our OR environment over the next two to five years, during which expected improvements may be incorporated to upgrade the system.