Traceability of Patient Records Usage: Barriers and Opportunities for Improving User Interface Design and Data Management

Although IT governance practices (like ITIL, which recommends on the use of audit logs for proper service level management) are being introduced in many Hospitals to cope with increasing levels of information quality and safety requirements, the standard maturity levels of hospital IT departments is still not enough to reach the level of frequent use of audit logs. This paper aims to address the issues related to the existence of AT in patient records, describe the Hospitals scenario and to produce recommendations. Representatives from four hospitals were interviewed regarding the use of AT in their Hospital IS. Very few AT are known to exist in these hospitals (average of 1 per hospital in an estimate of 21 existing IS). CIOs should to be much more concerned with the existence and maintenance of AT. Recommendations include server clock synchronization and using advanced log visualization tools.