Development of a clinical event monitor for use with the Veterans Affairs Computerized Patient Record System and other data sources.

We are developing an event monitor to operate with the Veterans Affairs Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS). The event monitor is designed to receive messages when important patient events such as posting of new results, patient movement, and orders occur. Our design separates the event monitor from CPRS itself, using communication via a network connection to receive HL7 messages, to access other data needed to run rules, and to communicate with providers by message display, electronic mail and other mechanisms. Results from operation of the event monitor using patient data in our test account show that a wide variety of data can be accessed by the event monitor with acceptable response times.