A Clinical Anesthesia Information Management System Constructed by Using Microsoft Access: A Preliminary Study

Objectives. As today's medical care becoming more competitive and patient-centered, quality assurance (QA) therefore becomes increasingly important. In order to provide a high standard patient care in our anesthesia service, we try to develop an anesthesia information management system (IMS) as a tool to serve as guidelines and surveillance to achieve quality improvements in our daily practice. Methods. Microsoft (MS) Access and MS Excel will be used to develop our IMS. 19,455 patients who received anesthesia in our hospital between January and November 2001 will be subjected to this study. Data analysis will be performed on some common side effects during the peri-operative period. These parameters include 1) intraoperative hypertension, 2) shivering in the post anesthesia unit, 3) post-anesthesia headache, 4) anesthesia techniques preference, and some other basic statistics regarding clinical anesthesia service. Results. The results are represented by five different queries and 1 graph produced by the IMS. Conclusions. MS Access is a powerful tool in developing an IMS for anesthesia QA as it can produce unlimited number of queries according to our demands. These data are valuable in the improvement of patient safety and quality.