THE EFFECT OF AN EPJ/TQM-SYSTEM ON MEDICAL QUALITY IN STRATEGICALLY SELECTED NORWEGIAN NURSING HOMES

The intervention element in this study is the electronic medical record- and quality system tested in a period of one year. This system has been developed through the project "Geriatric Basis Dataset - development, implementation and testing", supported b y "Kvalitetssikringsfond "? and described in the Master thesis [5]. Using the system in nursing homes will result in a broad spectrum of structured clinical data. For the purpose of this study, the impact on 5 drug related factors, motivation among emplo yees, nurse knowledge, and unrecognized delirium, will be tested. The system has a built-in automatic testing of drug interactions (DRUID) and a decision support system (Argus, - widely used by GP?s), which can be programmed to react on a broad variety of data values and combinations of data, and gives alarms on screen when mistakes are done.