Development of the Patient Data Reference System for Hospital Integration

Abstract

 The National Children’s Hospital and the National Okura Hospital were merged and re-organized to form the National Center for Child Health and Development (NCCHD). As a result of this merger, it was needed to easily maintain the medical records after the integration and to access the clinical data of patients of each old hospital. We have developed a system which allows the reference of patients’ history from the electronic medical record system. Since the integrated hospitals had different systems, in order to move the data to the new system, the data were converted to the electronic text-file format and merged together. After 3 months from the integration, we sent evaluation questionnaires to all doctors at NCCHD and subsequently confirmed that the patient data reference system was considered a useful method by many doctors (84.6%). For the future, we think it is important to allow enough preparation and planning before hospital integrations to ensure the smooth transfer of clinical data.