Design considerations for integrated hospital information systems

This article describes the main characteristics of the integrated hospital information system (HIS) environment, discusses design objectives, and analyzes four design issues--system architecture, conceptual data base design, application portfolio, and plans for development and implementation. The main objective is to provide managers and system designers with a guiding blueprint for HIS design based on state-of-the-practice technological capabilities and current experience with integrated HIS. Clearly, the capabilities of present information technology provide more feasible ways to implement integrated HIS in a distributed environment. This approach answers hospital information needs by shifting some of the processing and data to the end-user level, yet allows management to retain control of the central portion of the data base while facilitating data sharing among various organizational units.