| Abstract | This report describes a hospital-wide clinical computing system that permits physicians, nurses, medical
students, and other health workers to retrieve data from the clinical laboratories; to look up reports from
the departments of radiology and pathology; to look up demographic data and outpatient visits; to look up
prescriptions filled in the outpatient pharmacy; to perform bibliographic retrieval of the MEDLINE data
base; to read, write, retract, edit, and forward electronic mail; and to request delivery of a patient's chart.
During a one-week study period, from 300 video display terminals located throughout the hospital, 818
patient care providers used a common registry of 539,000 patients to look up clinical and laboratory data
16,768 times; 477 other hospital workers used the patient registry 46,579 times. In a separate study of
586 health care providers, 470 (80 per cent) indicated that they used computer terminals "most of the
time" to look up laboratory results; in contrast, 48 (8 per cent) preferred printed reports. Of 545 hospital
workers, 440 (81 per cent) indicated that the computer terminals definitely or probably made their work
more accurate, and 452 (83 per cent) indicated that terminals enabled them to work faster. The large
amount of use by clinicians and their judgment that the computer has been so helpful to them suggests that
a reliable, comprehensive, and easy-to-use computer system can contribute substantially to the quality of
patient care. |