Emergency Room

Abstract

The emergency room (ER) is a miniature hospital. Its normal operations involve admissions, ordering, reporting, processing, therapy, and discharge counseling. Because of this highly integrated collection of services and skills, and the obvious fact that the patients are, in most cases, in severe jeopardy, the emergency room arena becomes a serious challenge and test of systems involved with patient care. As a rule, the people working in emergency rooms are overworked, underpaid, and overutilized. Many physicians do not appreciate being called to the Emergency Room, and therefore are less than hospitable to its working staff. Those that have full-time faculty know that much hostility and antagonism can in fact be defused, and that the operation can be smoothed out to a point where it is a highly successful and rewarding area of work. Nonetheless, the demands are heavy, liabilities are high, and the expectations of patient and family alike are extreme. All of this creates an environment in which systems are tested to their fullest and most certainly fail if there happens to be one slight flaw. Our efforts to work with this department have been extensive and involve a series of tests during the evaluation of our prototype system. After many changes of hardware and software, we finally are approaching the expectations and requirements of the emergency facility.