IT-Enabled Support for Anesthesia Preoperative Evaluation Clinics

In hospitals, the anesthesia preoperative evaluation clinic helps physicians and patients estimate the risks of scheduled surgical procedures and prepare better plans. Information systems can support these assessments, but most such systems in hospitals focus primarily on displaying and storing patient records. The authors use a three-tier architecture to develop a computerized clinical procedure system with embedded medical guidelines and risk-estimating algorithms to facilitate anesthetists' risk factor assessment. The system was tested in the anesthesia department of a major hospital in Taiwan and was found to be generally accepted by anesthetists.