Physicians' workstations: integrated information management for clinicians

This paper describes a project to specify, design, develop, and evaluate a physician's workstation for use in patient care. We conducted an ethnographic study of physicians' information needs in an outpatient setting, from which we derived a set of functional specifications for a physician's workstation. We have implemented an experimental prototype using an open systems, client/server architecture, and are exploring research issues in heterogeneous database integration, object-oriented database technology, model-based reasoning, and semantic integration. We plan to evaluate our workstation prototype in a clinical setting to assess its impact on quality of care and health care costs.