S. Henzi¹

¹Mühledorfstrasse 1, 3018 Bern, Switzerland

The requirements that medical information systems have to fulfil continue to grow steadily: While some aspects of electronic data processing are already well established, there is still room for improvement. In the communication between laboratories and private practices there is a special need for improvement in the field of order entry. It is common for many doctors to mail their samples to the laboratory in paper form, which requires them to then be either processed manually or via OCR-scanner. This is a time- and cost consuming method, especially in contrast to electronic solutions. In addition to saving time and money, it is imperative to promote the use of electronic order entry in order to avoid patient misidentification and to optimise work processes. At first glance, implementing an electronic interface in the private practice’s system appears to be the obvious choice, but this method is bound to fail due to the absence of a common coding system for data exchanges (e.g. LOINC). If instead, the laboratory’s electronic order system is integrated “seamlessly” into that of the doctor’s office, the coding problem is solved and the system also gains the expert knowledge of the laboratory. Open source solutions like the Swiss Elexis system offer cost-effective methods that are easily capable of providing this type of integrated workflow for doctor’s offices of any size. Important patient-specific information, e.g. insurance data, is transferred to the laboratory’s information system (LIS) and appears automatically in the order entry mask. Moreover, the system guides the user through the ordering process and automatically provides all the required information. The result is that human mistakes are avoided and high quality service can be guaranteed. Eventually, the user’s experience becomes part of a working synergy between the laboratory’s system and the doctor’s system. Combined in this manner, the quality of the results is optimised in a very time and cost-effective way.