Computing tools for quality assurance.

Computing systems for quality assessment in the operative departments, in anaesthesia and intensive care were developed at the Altona General Hospital, Hamburg. The main goals were to support quality assurance as a tool for the medical staff which they can use actively in their routine work and to reorganize uneconomical forms of clinical data handling. The most important characteristics of the tools presented here are flexibility of the databases and applications, openness to individual configurations and integration of quality assessment, activity audits and clinical routine under the primacy of medical documentation. Research is aimed at new forms of medical documentation, problem-oriented presentation and focusing of clinical data in the context of quality assurance programs.