Introduction
QCare ER is the solution to register and support the workflow and the patient follow up on the emergency department, starting from the moment the patient enters until he leaves the hospital or is transfered to the nursing wards, the OR or the ICU.
QCare ER offers physicians, nurses and the adminstrative staff support for the triage, the diagnostics, the treatment and the reporting for the patient on the emergency department. QCare ER assists a quality ensured patient care and a thorough documentation of the patients record.
In the QCare suite, QCare ER has an important place because of the entry point character of the emergency department. Therefore, it goes without saying that the information from the ER will be put at the immediate disposal of the other products in the QCare Suite as well as at the disposal of the hospital systems.
Arrival and triage
When a patient arrives by ambulance, a box can immediately be reserved and a treatment- and examinations protocol is prepared.
When the patient enters personally, a triage follows in which the next steps concerning the treatment and examinations become clear : immediate transferral to another department in het hospital, to a box or waiting room or in certain cases, transferral to the GP.
Dashboard
On a ground floor representation, an overview of the status of all patients (in boxes and in waiting rooms) is indicated by means of colour codes and summary fields.
In one glance, the physician or nurse gets an overview of :
the degree of severity,
the medical specialty of the problem,
the responsible doctors and nurses,
the problem identification and the diagnostic,
the orders, examinations and tasks that have to be executed,
the patients status,
the last received results,
the waiting time, including a signal function when an acceptable waiting time for the given problem has passed.
From the beds overview, the user has access to all detail screens from the patients record.
Problem list
In the screen of the problem list, the physician sees the medical history inserted in previous admissions.
He completes the present patients' status by means of diagnostics or remarks. The diagnostics are based on the ICD9 or 10 classification and will be made usable through the options of QCare ICU : search function, classification proper to the hospital, proper terminology for diagnostics, search for frequently used codes or creation of new codes.
Treatment
The planning is the hinge between the activities of physisicans and nurses: here new orders are made, changed, extended and stopped. Based on these orders, QCare ER automatically generates a nursing planning: a visual interface based on a time line on which is indicated very clearly when orders must be carried out, with detailed dosages, flows, ways of administration, samples to be taken and additional information.
The nurses indicate when an order was carried out and the reasons for which they would have possibly deviated from an order. By indicating that a prescription was executed, QCare ER can send the necessary consumption overviews to the invoicing departments, calculate balances and generate statistics.
Together with the planning timeline, QCare ER offers an overview of monitoring, respiratory and laboratory results, scores, functions or observations.
Results
The result viewers allow the users to consult and compare results provided by the laboratory, medical devices or observations that have been filled out manually. The user can see results from the complete history of the patient and can create graphse with one click of the mouse. All results stay available on line. On the receipt of new or abnormal results, a warning can be defined (deviating colour, sound, warning window or a combination of those)
Internal reporting
To have a clear overview on the mass of data (a computer screen is always limited in surface), summaries will be made. In a summary, important data or free text are put together. The structure of a summary is determined by the users. The summary can be adapted on every moment from no matter which module. If the user looks at the summary, he can go back in time to read remarks that were made that day, week or month. The summaries of QCare ER are not limited in length or number and therefore allow every user to consult his own separate summary.
External reporting
Letters and reports (admission, discharge, present status ...) are made using templates. A template consists of default texts and references to certain data from the patients record : if the user creates a new report for a patient, these data will not have to be re-entered. | 
