Inpatient Clinical Information Systems

Electronic health records (EHRs) are increasingly being deployed as digital inpatient information systems of clinical and administrative data. The interplay of social and technical factors is important when considering effective implementation and adoption strategies in busy, complex hospital environments. These systems offer considerable potential to enhance the safety, quality, and efficiency of hospital healthcare provision, but realizing these benefits is heavily dependent on system optimization. The optimization of inpatient information systems is best conceptualized as an ongoing journey. Developments such as the move to cloud-based EHRs, the opening up of application program interfaces, the opportunity to connect with other digitized hospital infrastructure such as smart infusion pumps and beds, patient access to EHRs, and developments in approaches to and capacity for interrogating standalone and linked EHR-based datasets in real time present major new opportunities to improve outcomes. These developments will however also bring important new ethical, organizational, and privacy related challenges that society will need to address.