The HELP system

Abstract

Development of a comprehensive computer system for acquiring medical data and implementing medical decision logic has been ongoing for over 15 years at the University of Utah and the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. This system is known as HELP and is currently operational at LDS Hospital, which is a 550-bed tertiary care hospital serving the needs of the intermountain west. This hospital also serves as one of the primary teaching centers for the University of Utah Medical School. Having been developed in this environment, the design of the HELP system was required to meet the administrative, clinical, teaching, and research needs of hospitals, as well as provide the decision-making capability.

Development and Evaluation of a Computerized Admission Diagnoses Encoding System

“…HELP was originally developed at LDS Hospital, a 500-bed, private, tertiary care facility located in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has been involved in the delivery of medical care since the mid-1970s. The intention of the system designers was to create a HIS that could serve the administrative, research, clinical, financial, and teaching needs of the hospital (1)(2)(3).…”

Assessing the Effectiveness of a Computerized Pharmacy System

“…The LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a 520 bed facility with a clinical computer system (HELP) that gathers data from many services within the hospital [10,11]. The result is a rich clinical patient database.…”

“…The result is a rich clinical patient database. Data in the system is obtained from automated equipment in clinical laboratories and intensive care units, as well as from pharmacy, surgery, multiphasic screening areas, admitting, 0195-4210/90/0000/0668$01.00 1990 SCAMC, Inc. and medical records areas [10,11]. …”

“…Monitoring System orders are entered by hand into the patient chart, then are -entered into the HELP computer system by a pharmacist or a nurse [10,11]. Evaluating the benefit of the alerting scheme was much more difficult [13].…”

The Role of Expert Systems in Improving the Test Requesting Patterns of Clinicians

“…The HELP system incorporates both reactive and proactive systems in laboratory applications. 53 Initially, there was widespread optimism that this technology would be valuable if applied routinely in laboratory medicine. 54 In practice, however, progress has been slow largely because the problems encountered by early developers adversely affected the acceptability of systems and restricted their practical application.…”