Sunderby Hospital: built to be paperless
Sunderby Hospital in northern Sweden has been paperless since it opened
in 1999. Project Manager Robert Stewing explains how this was
accomplished.
ABSTRACT
Norrbotten County Council has been developing a countywide communications
system for healthcare since the early 90s. At its heart is a combined
hospital information-support and electronic patient-record system — the VAS
— which also functions as a portal to various archives/digitised information
banks and, by use of a message broker, to linked systems.
When Sunderby Hospital, which opened in 1999, was designed and built as a
paperless hospital, further extensive development of the VAS was carried out
involving the introduction of additional electronic systems and integrating
them with each other. All the hospitals and care centres in the area now use
the single database on the VAS, and further developments are ongoing.
Br J Healthcare Comput Info Manage 2005; 22(10): 19–21 |
