The automated anesthesia record.

Many phases of modern anesthesia keep the anesthetist too busy to obtain and plot physiologic data or to record anesthetic events. Yet the anesthesia record serves as a log book, a clinical management tool, a trend and pattern plotter, as well as a medical-legal document. If these functions are important, an automated anesthesia recording system is needed for charting the data reliably and accurately. Automating the anesthesia record also lays the ground work for abstracting the data and generating records with specific information sought by the anesthetist, the physicians in the recovery room and intensive care unit, the administrators of the hospital, as well as representatives with interest in medical-legal problems.