Barriers integrating dedicated software for quality management in pain centres.

Objectives: Explore the feasibility of integrating a dedicated pain centre information system as part of a quality management network with a number of different Hospital Information Systems.

Material & Methods: A systematic approach integrating and implementing the system in 15 selected hospital organisations (a nationwide 15% non-random sample).

Results: Hospitals have widely varying policies on integration and implementation of additional clinically required 3rd party software.

Patient-centred care: using online personal medical records in IVF practice.

Background: Generic patient-accessible medical records have shown promise in enhancing patient-centred care for patients with chronic diseases. We sought to design, implement and evaluate a patient-accessible medical record specifically for patients undergoing a course of assisted reproduction (IVF or ICSI).

Methods: The personal medical record (PMR) database was developed using three formative evaluation steps, and its user-experience was evaluated through a cross-sectional study.

Quality control in management of pain.

Since 1987 several pain clinics in The Netherlands have started with some kind of computer-assisted recording of data, mainly for purposes of quality control. However, this has not yet led to routinely generated reports about the quality of these clinics because a consensus on how to assess quality in pain-treatment is missing. Using classical system-development methods a global specification for an information system for quality assessment was defined on which a prototype application was based.

Pain clinic EPR: requirements determination & configuration.

Unlabelled: The focus of this study was to determine requirements for a general pain EPR (electronic patient record), design this EPR and develop a prototype for demo purposes in pain clinics in The Netherlands. The specifications for this EPR were derived from the 'Nijmegen Classification of Pain', analysis of patient paper records and in-depth interviews with six anaesthesiologists, three physiotherapists and two psychologists. For development a generic configuration tool was used.