The approach at the German Heart Institute in Berlin - the BERMED - System

Summary

Integration and communication of medical patient data play a key role in improving medical care and providing intelligent systems support for diagnosis and therapy. Medicine is traditionally associated with the two aspects of documentation and communication of patient data and findings. In this respect, documentation and communication not only serve the scientific aims, but also help to ensure the rationality, consistency and continuity of medical care itself. Nowadays, much of the medical patient data already exists in digital form, for example x-ray images, angiographic images and patient data of heart catheterization, ECG curves, findings, medical reports and intensive care monitor data. Other data may exist in analog form, in writing or even only orally. In order to provide efficient and, above all, high-quality support for the work of the nursing staff and the physicians, the various types of data and the way in which they are managed and used must be related to the intended applications. There must be a logical integration of the data and the related functionality, including the logical interpretation, should be supported by computer. The electronical medical record is not only the complete and gapeless documentation of an even extremely complex situation, such as a hospital stay, but the utilization of all patient related information which during the complete course of the disease has been acquired regardless of where, when and of which data structure. (Multimedia in the true sense.) Any centralized solution, such as a general database, smart card etc., will be inappropriate since it cannot cope with the demands for the integration of existing distributed subsystems nor for the demands of future systems.