The Medical Record Linkage Process within the Diogene Hospital Information System

Abstract

In the DIOGENE HIS (Hospital Information System), all the medical and administrative information about a patient is recorded systematically. However, despite all the identification checks made when the patient is admitted, readmitted or transferred to one of the outpatient clinics, it occurs from time to time that a patient might be registered more than once. The present paper gives first an overview of the most frequent conditions of multiple registration of the same patient, and of the following consequences; secondly, it describes and shows the effectiveness of the software tools installed to overcome the problems encountered when dealing with the multiplicity of identification records, from the design stage to its implementation onto an open architecture.

Taking into account the wide variety of cases encountered, the linkage as such is a computer-assisted linkage, that is to say, an interactive application programme that provides for easy consultation of all records selected for each patient and, whenever it is feasible, displays a sound proposal of the best possible linkage for the selected set of records. The approach chosen for the implementation is decentralised and based upon object-oriented programming using Smalltalk 80. Considerable expertise has been acquired in representing and manipulating objects of a “linked-list data-base” and of its associate design of a new friendly user interface.