2000 Volume 20 Issue 1 Pages 17-31
Failures of hospital information system (HIS) cause egregious impacts on medical service. On June 26 1998, the HIS functions in Ehime University Hospital went down during consultation hours and all HIS functions were out of order for two hours. Just one month and about one year after the trouble day, we surveyed opinions twice concerning HIS from outpatients by questionnaire. These surveys elucidated that (1) the HIS failure led to 2 hours and 45 minutes prolongation of outpatient stay in our hospital, (2) hand writing procedure (i.e., conventional paper slip system) instead of HIS couldn’t absorb the delay due to the HIS failure, (3) there is no significant differences among hospital stay hours in terms of arrival time, (4) nursing staffs were the most familiar for patients to inform HIS failure compared to any other staffs, and squawk box was not so effective to inform it, (5) if time span to reboot HIS is less than 30 minutes, it’s a choice that HIS once reboot without switching HIS function to hand writing procedure. Requirements for the HIS and hospital administration in the future were also discussed.
