In theory, creating an electronic anesthesia record and importing it into a patient's electronic medical record should be easy. You just connect the vital signs monitor to the network running the EMR software and the anesthesia information will flow directly into the patient's record and billing software, right? Unfortunately, linking monitors to EMR systems is usually not a plug-and-play operation. There might be a serial plug in the back of your monitor, but unless you recently purchased an enterprise system with an anesthesia module that captures all clinical and patient information, your monitoring devices and EMR system are going to have trouble talking to each other.