Electronic Medical Records in Clinical Diabetes Care

IN THE LAST Diabetes Information Technology & WebWatch column1 various issues surroundingthe use of computer programs that link patient blood glucose meters with personal comput-ers were discussed. In this column, issues related to the wider application of hospital-based and primary care diabetes medical record systems for health care professional use will be consid-ered. HOSPITAL-BASED SYSTEMS Although paper-based medical records have served clinical medicine well for a long time, needs appear to be changing. As well as being used for routine patient care, there is a growing need to be able to regularly and rapidly access components of patient records for audit, research, and management purposes. Manually trawling through notes to retrieve such information is in-efficient and prohibitively time consuming. Furthermore, if required on a frequent basis, for ex-ample, to automatically identify patients who have missed an important test or follow-up ap-pointment, paper-based audit becomes completely impractical. Given this, in diabetes care where patient notes can grow to many volumes, and where the accuracy of the information recorded can become increasingly difficult to verify as time passes, increasing interest is focusing on the application of electronic medical records