An architecture for an integrated medical workstation : its realization and evaluation

Abstract

This study describes the development of the HERMES integrated medical workstation for the support of patient care and clinical data analysis. Tbis development proceeded in two steps. First, a prototype integrated workstation was developed for the limited domain of support for clinical data analysis. Second, insight resulting from experience with the design and implementation of the prototype, and from the outcome of its formal user evaluation were used as input to design the new HERMES architecture, also intended to encompass the support of patient care. HERMES offers a solution for the urgent problem in medical informatics of integrating different applications on different hosts. Our approach combines the client-server paradigm with a graphical user interface to provide user-friendly access to the clinician. Its application domain includes both patient care and clinical data analysis. In this introductory chapter, we will briefly introduce the idea of providing integrated computer support to the clinician and the recent progress made in computer science that enables this novel approach to workstation integration