Electronic health records in prehospital care

Katharina Rohrer, Geraldine Fitzpatrick
2018
Documentation is an essential part and duty in all clinical settings. Approaches, such as writing on pieces of paper or on gloves, have been replaced by various electronic documentation systems which already established as the state-of-the-art approach to satisfy documentation requirements. New concepts, such as Electronic Health Records, start to emerge in our daily life by bringing transparency to our health. 'ELGA' (short for 'Elektronische Gesundheitsakte') represents the Austrian
more » ... Health Record and stores medical documents, such as medical letters or lab findings. Moreover the current medication is accessible in a clearly organized list. Each Austrian citizen has an entry in ELGA but can restrict the access. ELGA represents therefore an interesting information source with a huge amount of data available that is intended to support the process of clinical decision-making. However the use case of integrating ELGA to out-of-hospital settings, such as prehospital care, is not defined yet although the need of a complete documentation and communication system is indispensable for providing highest quality standards. This thesis explores the special requirements in prehospital care. The aim of the research is to identify needed information at the emergency scene to establish appropriate decisions about diagnosis, treatments and transport. To achieve correct conclusions a deep understanding of the processes and workflows during an emergency is required and needs to be established. Moreover the use case of integrating an Electronic Health Record to an out-of-hospital setting is discussed by mapping available data fields in ELGA to the required data at the emergency scene. To satisfy the research goal an exploratory research using field work and expert interviews was done as well as a systematic analysis of findings. The field work and expert interviews were analyzed and structured with a thematic analysis approach. It was possible to gain valuable insights and collect real-life cases during research. The fi [...]
doi:10.34726/hss.2017.38121 fatcat:hvtk3ukdefe6vio6mmjktarkhu