Legal Aspects of AIMS

The development of AIMS and the more comprehensive EMR has focused primarily on the myriad of technologic challenges. As these challenges are met and electronic systems become the accepted method for record keeping, medicolegal proceedings will inevitably rely upon electronic data to determine liability when patient injury occurs. This chapter will address the current understanding of the legal aspects of AIMS, recognizing that in the future, the courts and legislatures will ultimately determine how these systems are used in medicolegal proceedings.

The EMR, whereby all information related to the medical care of a patient is recorded and stored, has been under development for decades, and many pioneers have implemented sophisticated systems for creating some version of an EMR. 1 Although these systems have proven themselves to be useful, few, if any, have been capable of creating a truly complete medical record that incorporates all aspects of a patient’s medical care. AIMS were first introduced more than 20 years ago as computerized record-keeping systems designed to automatically record data from physiologic monitors, accept input of drug dosages and comments, and print highly legible paper records for patients’ charts. Varied systems from multiple vendors have been adopted and are in use in thousands of anesthetizing locations worldwide. Although many departments have adopted AIMS, the overwhelming majority of anesthesia records are still created by hand. As a component of the EMR, the information collected by the AIMS has the potential to be a high-resolution record of the care rendered to a patient during a procedure that requires anesthesia.