Glossary » CPR

CPR

computer-based patient record, a computer system for clinical use to record and retrieve patient information and patient care, and to provide a wide variety of other tools to both clinical and non-clinical staff, possibly in almost any clinical setting, from hospitals to home care.

Applications may include entering orders and scheduling medications and other treatments, retrieving information from other hospital computing systems (lab, pharmacy, admissions, etc.), providing decision-making support to physicians, and even helping hospitals track the success of care for patients.

Usability considerations include:

• operating in a hospital environment, with mobile users often desiring handsfree use.
• protecting the security and privacy of patient information.
• providing effective access to extremely large databases of patient treatment data, medical nomenclature, and medications.
• providing successful user interfaces for users with widely varying educational backgrounds and generally very little time for system training.

CPRs are also occasionally known by these other terms (sometimes with subtle distinctions):

• CIS – clinical information system
• EPR – electronic patient record
• EMR – electronic medical record