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The anaesthetic report: custom-made printouts from anaesthesia-information-management-systems using extensible stylesheet language transformation

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Abstract

Objective

Today many anaesthetic departments use electronic Anaesthesia-Information-Management-Systems (AIMS). Although these systems retain clinical information electronically, a printed report is still essential for a systematic patient-handover and as a part of the patient’s records. As the printouts produced by common AIMS usually do not fit in the department’s document system, we searched for a method to generate our own automatic anaesthetic reports.

Methods

As the AIMS we use provides all data in XML-format (Extensible Markup Language), we designed a postoperative report using Extensible Stylesheet Language—Transformation (XSLT). The result was encouraging enough to develop further applications for this platform. These are demonstrated in the present paper.

Results/Conclusion

XSLT proved to be a very satisfactory technique to create different printouts and is therefore a feasible technique to enhance any AIMS. As XML turns out to be one of the most important formats for medical data, we call for the development of an international anaesthetic XML-standard and its adoption to AIMS.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the staff of IMESO Ltd (Hüttenberg, Germany), who rendered assistance to our XSL-project whenever we needed support. We thank especially Mr. Jan Carmans, computer scientist and HTLM-specialist at IMESO, who encoded a couple of sections when our XSL-knowledge was overstrained.

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest and there was no financial funding of the work presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anaesthesiology, University Hospital of Munich-Campus Großhadern, Marchioninistr. 15, 81377, Munich, Germany

    Andreas Meyer-Bender (Dr. med.), Richard Spitz (Dr. med.) & Bernhard Pollwein (Dr. med.)

Authors
  1. Andreas Meyer-Bender
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  2. Richard Spitz
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  3. Bernhard Pollwein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Meyer-Bender.

Additional information

Meyer-Bender A, Spitz R, Pollwein B. The anaesthetic report: custom-made printouts from anaesthesia-information-management-systems using extensible stylesheet language transformation.

Parts of this paper were presented as a poster at the German Anaesthetic Congress (“Deutscher Anästhesiecongress—DAC”) in 2008 in Nuremberg.

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Meyer-Bender, A., Spitz, R. & Pollwein, B. The anaesthetic report: custom-made printouts from anaesthesia-information-management-systems using extensible stylesheet language transformation. J Clin Monit Comput 24, 51–60 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10877-009-9209-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10877-009-9209-5

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