A comprehensive patient care system for the family practice

Abstract

Family and Community Health Associates (FACHA) has incorporated an in-house, on-line computerized medical information system into a two-office, three-physician family practice medicine group. A Basic Four System 610 minicomputer is utilized to store all the medical, pharmaceutical, financial, and scheduling records. A SOAP-formated encounter form is used to collect the data. Five medical reports are printed prior to each patient encounter. Evaluations of the use and the benefits of this system are presented. A cost study, which calculated the cost of maintaining a computer-stored patient record, showed that a patient record could be updated and maintained for $1.32. A quality of care evaluation revealed that the preaudit of the computer-generated medical reports increased patient compliance to health maintenance suggestions. Another quality of care evaluation revealed that computer-generated flow charts did not significantly improve the diastolic blood pressure value of chronic hypertensive patients.

Users’ satisfaction with the primary health care information system in Croatia: a cross-sectional study

“…In spite of a number of articles on the Croatian primary health care information system published in internationally available journals (1,21-23,25-32) and in several other sources (proceedings and reports), this study is the first evaluation of this system from the end-user point of view. Most previous studies pay attention to particular aspects of the health information system, like prevention and management of chronic diseases (5,33), financial expenses (15,34), access time (17), patient point of view (6,35), effect of electronic reminders (36-39), and quality of care, duration of consultation, stress for physicians, and overall problem of using modern technology (16,18). Having in mind that any information system is only as good as the end-users rate it, we decided to start an evaluation based on user satisfaction.…”