Computer use by nutrition services departments in Canadian hospitals
1996
Piche, L.A.
The objectives of the present study were to 1) determine the status of computer use by nutrition services departments in Canadian hospitals, 2) obtain specific details about the nature and capabilities of these computer systems and 3) compare the results of a standard One-Day food record analysis generated by the different programs reported in use. A 38-item questionnaire and a standard one-day food record were mailed to all managers of nutrition services departments of Canadian hospitals with > 100 beds. The response rate was 42% and more than one-half of the hospitals (54%, 53%, 56%) reported using computers for Patient/Clinical Care (P/CC), Staff Administration (Admin) and Food Production Management (FPM), respectively. Fifty-eight per cent of respondents were using smaller stand-alone, 30% larger commercially available and 18% internal/custom design systems. There was general agreement among the 41 hospitals with computational analysis capabilities on total energy and quantities of fat, protein, carbohydrates, cholesterol, sodium and fibre in the standard one-day food record analysis. In conclusion, 1) the use of computers for nutrition service related functions has increased substantially within the last decade, 2) the majority of software packages in use were the smaller stand-alone commercial variety, 3) 20% of hospitals [41 of 209 respondents] were using computers capable of diet computation analysis at the time of the survey.
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