Emergency Medicine Informatics: Information Management and Applications in the 21st Century

Emergency Medicine Informatics (EMI) is the collection, management, processing, and

application of emergency patient care and operational data. EMI is transforming and

improving our prehospital care systems and emergency department (ED) operations, is

critical for public health surveillance, and will enable us to expand clinical research in our

institutions, regions, and nations. EMI is one of our most important tools for improving

emergency care and positively impacting the health of the public.

For prehospital care, EMI systems provide information to analyze the cost-effectiveness of

clinical interventions, to organize EMS operations, to coordinate communication for

service requests, to monitor quality control and educational needs, and to track patient

outcomes.

The practice of emergency medicine in the ED requires the capture of many data and

time elements so that ED care is efficient. EMI modules support triage acuity and

tracking, patient tracking, nurse and physician charting, clinical decision support, order

entry, and discharge instructions and prescription generation. There must be

coordination of the EMI with hospital, laboratory, and radiology reporting systems, and

access to hospital and ambulatory clinic records.

Clinical information should be aggregated into an ED Database which can then be used

for clinical investigation. The cooperation and support of the hospital information

services department, hospital administration, emergency medicine physicians, and

emergency medicine researchers, is necessary so that the ED database will be well

constructed, and most importantly, well used to improve patient care.

Because the information from aggregated ED databases provides population-based

information about acute illness and injury, ED databases are now one of the key

elements of public health surveillance. An effective syndromic surveillance system based

upon ED Chief Complaint (CC), nursing triage note, and ICD-9 or-10 CM codes requires

the cooperation of hospital information systems professionals, hospital administrators,

ED directors, and public health professionals.