Computerization in hospitals can be mechanically implemented so as to achieve almost the same serviceability as that in banks in the sense of providing better accessibility. For a decade of EDP developing the two service businesses have provided a different extent of applications. Because most of the processing data types in banking systems are of text, the applications were rather easy to implement. The existent nationwide network providing for cross-bank service to their clients was once a prominent example. With successful implementations of the computers, the Banks could provide better services, while the hospital information systems (HIS) still busied with the problems of integrating the various aspects of implementation. Because of lacking of the suitable software and/or hardware solutions to synthesize several professional fields, most of HISs were limited in-house applications. Thus, most of the traditional HISs rarely met business target of the hospital administrators – reduction of manual efforts. In hospitals we think it is urgent to enhance HIS capability to cope with every procedure as detail as possible to reduce labor and put useful effort toward patient-care. This is a better way to give patients' pleasure without additional labor cost. Therefore, deliberately developing HIS becomes one of the most effective strategies of hospitals.
In our hospital, the Veterans General Hospital at Kaohsiung, many applications were implemented with bar-coding. Then we made a long term plan. First, we re-arranged the IBM-compatible mainframe's execution environment to resolve the constraint of virtual address space, with which a job region may become sluggish in response even the central processing unit is under loaded. Second, we successfully moved many applications to the local area network (LAN). All our report processing was processed and stored in the netware servers that communicate with the mainframe. The applications of the employees' sign-in-sign-out and maintenance management were also implemented in the LANs. Because of partitioning our on-line job execution regions from two to five, the system operation became complicated.Thus, we started a project to automate our system operation.
Then, we could lengthen each on-line job's window. The most critical job is for the emergency, which is almost twenty-four hours on-line operation. The daily shutdown window is less than thirty minutes. In order for the physicians to have a more convenient way to access images, we issued a pilot project in 1998 to survey and study the acceptance of digital images. After two years development and deployment, we had been established an lively and stably accessible picture archive and communication system, namely the PACS, achieving to an almost filmless services. While getting worse situation for struggling with the capitation payment from the National Health Insurance (NHI) program, the hospital seems more to rely and demand on the instantaneously valuable information than before. A web-based executive information system (EIS) has been provided for the persons in managing level. In the same time another application to replace the manual medical records to computerized data was designed with the JAVA programming technique and established a year ago for the department of psychiatrics. That will be a model of the computer-based medical record system of hospital in the future.
Recently, we have our computing personnel to remold the physician's order processing and the billing management to react to the new charging calculation. Because of the improving effort, the remolded functions are smooth.
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Telphone Number : 886-7-3422121ext5501
Fax Number : 886-7-3468322
E-Mail : wwwisc@vghks.gov.tw
Address : 386 Ta-Chung 1st RD. Kaohsiung, Taiwan 813 R.O.C. Information Management Office