Transfer data to quality of treatment database

Odense University Hospital, Denmark, ENT Department

Healthcare is characterized by having a multitude of clinical quality databases covering the various clinical disciplines, e.g., cancer, heart diseases, apoplexia, etc. For some of those databases, there is no data interface, or the vendors of the clinical systems have not implemented the integration.

A set of robots are configured to support the whole work process from capturing data from thyroid cancer surgeries to transferring the data to the national quality database (THYKIR).

The process is done in two stages. First the surgery is done where the data is captured. Depending on information from the first surgery, a subsequent surgery can be required. There is a robot that presents the surgeon with an input form for the clinical information relevant for the surgery being done. The robot saves data in the medical record so it can be presented for the surgeon at subsequent surgeries. When all surgeries are done, a quality employee activates a separate robot that transfers all clinical data to the national quality database. The transfer takes 2-3 seconds compared to the previous time-consuming task of retyping all information from the 5-8 pages of paper. Thereto it eliminates the risk of mistyping data from the paper into the quality database. The robot can transfer data for a set of patients, so it only needs to run every week or month, depending on the number of surgeries being done.