MEDITECH Surveillance Rules Engine

In MEDITECH 6.1, the Surveillance dictionaries are housed under Quality Management. Both Quality and Clinical staff will use these tools to monitor the patient population.

The Surveillance Rules engine functions differently than the Rules Engine used to apply clinical decision support in ordering and documentation. These rules are comprised of “Facts”. Each fact is built out separately and then added to the rule it’s going to be applied to.

The design philosophy behind this was to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. For instance, a “Fact” could say, only look at the INPATIENT population or only assess if a problem wasn’t present on admission. Once facts are built they can be applied to many different rules that assess for different things.

The above fact will assess the patient for a change in the level of consciousness. This fact will most likely be used is assessing the patient population for a variety of conditions: UTI, Dementia, Stroke, VAP and Sepsis for example all use these criteria.