The use of a computer-based patient record is a relatively new phenomenon in home health care. The strategic decisions that underlie an agency's development of an electronic record system are key to the successful implementation of a point-of-care system. The article describes two approaches taken within a large urban home health agency to develop a computer-based patient record, one integrating a state-of-the-art pen-based computer system into a legacy mainframe system, and the other creating an entirely new information system to run in a client-server environment on laptop computers.
