Trends in Integrated Clinical Workstations

During the last decade, several projects aiming at integrated clinical workstations have been described and several prototypes have been demonstrated. In most of these projects, the clinical workstation accesses information and functionality provided by the present proprietary legacy systems of health-care institutions. We discuss trends in integrated clinical workstations from the viewpoints of software engineering and integration, considering that the clinical workstation itself basically consists of three layers: a presentation layer, a data integration layer, and a communication layer. The software engineering view on clinical workstations focuses on the development of basic building blocks from which clinical workstations, specific to a particular medical domain, can be composed. The integration view on clinical workstations addresses methods and techniques to deal with the, in general, intrinsically closed information systems in health-care institutions.