Medical applications of electronic data processing in surgery, trauma surgery and orthopedics. Results of a survey of 1,450 clinics

Abstract

With a standardized questionnaire we evaluated 1450 orthopedic and general surgery departments. The response rate was 57.2%, 52% of the departments were using computers for different purposes. The favoured system was the MS-DOS system (73%). The computers were mainly used for word processing (58%), statistics (50%), and graphics (39%). For clinical routine the leading use was patient documentation (70%) followed by patient report generation (43%). Other applications (e.g. online use of administrative data (19.4%) or the use of other patient information like blood parameters (10%)) were relatively rarely used. However, most of the users have plans to incorporate these applications in the nearest future. For the out patients care the leading application is private billing (42.5%) and statistics (30%). The majority of the departments (42.6%) only have one PC. Most of the departments use the printer for hard copies and as hard disc a the standard storage medium. The average storage capacity of the used hard discs is 40 to 80 MB. Other peripheral tools like a laser printer, a scanner, or modems are rarely used. Most of the departments invested between 5000 and 15,000,--DM. 33.3% financed the computers only with the official budget of the department. However, 25.8% only used private funds to buy the hard- and software. The distribution according to zip codes showed a slight accommodation in Bavaria and NRW. The amount of new installations showed an almost constant increase from 1975 until 1981. Between 1981 and 1990 there was a significant increase with a small drop in 1986.