Abstract
There exists various “boundaries” in medical records: paper-based medical records are managed by each department for years and inpatient records are usually put into a folder for each admission; on the other hand, for electronic medical records, each record is typically stored in the subsystem that created the record. The more boundaries, the more effort required to reach the target record. Therefore, managing all records in a logically single place and accessing them in a uniform manner— i.e., integrated document management— are desirable in terms of clinical practice.
The goal of our research is to demonstrate validity of integrated document management feature of DACS (Document Archiving and Communication System). In order to achieve this goal, we conducted an analysis of the system log of the DACS running at Osaka University Hospital to figure out how many document views across the boundaries actually occurred.
As a result, a total of 137,040 access threads, each of which indicates the sequence of a patient's documents viewed by a physician at one time, were identified. We also found that 42.2% of the threads involved document views across department boundaries, 27.7% across admission boundaries and 69.1% across subsystem boundaries. The result implies validity of integrated document management of DACS.
