Frustrated by the difficulty of hand-compiling the data he needed for his research from patient charts, Dr. Steven Lipman, Clinical Assistant Professor of the Department of Anesthesia, approached IRT's System Development and Data Management group (SDDM) in late 2004 with a request for a custom data entry application that would put all the factors involved in an obstetric anesthesia encounter in a single database. Dr. Lipman's vision is that the cross-correlation and analysis of the hundreds of variables that can be present in any given obstetric encounter can be used not only to answer simple statistical questions but also to verify hypotheses about adverse events and their correlated factors.

In close collaboration with Dr. Lipman, SDDM has built the High Risk Obstetric Anesthesia Database, a structured data entry and reporting system for obstetric anesthesia encounters that is not only fully HIPAA compliant but is also architected to ensure the highest possible data quality and integrity. The system's primary use is as a tool in Anesthesia's continuing efforts to optimize patient safety. Dr. Lipman also plans to use the system to drive a simulation based OB crisis management course he is developing to train teams of healthcare providers who work on L&D for emergencies in high risk patients.

The core of the application is the eight page input form incorporating approximately 300 distinct factors used to create the record of a single high risk patient encounter. Both patients and encounters, once created, can be located and edited independently. All encounter data is available as an exported Excel spreadsheet, one encounter per row, for final analysis.

Screen Shots

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