Medical information networking and standardization

There are few environments that generate and manage as much information as the hospital. Although computers are used extensively to manage this information, their application has been opportunistic rather than strategic. This has led to a multi-vendor information processing environment in many hospitals. Hospitals today have financial systems, order-entry communication systems, ADT systems, and clinical systems such as laboratory, pharmacy, etc. Communication between these islands of automation however are still, for the most part, primitive. Exceptions are in the large teaching hospitals where internal staff have been utilized to link systems together. The effort has traditionally been huge and fraught with difficulties related to the heterogeneous environment that is involved. In order to overcome these problems and enable us to truly bring the power of modern computing to bear on hospital-wide problems, as well as to make feasible, for example, the computerized medical record, we must develop an appropriate strategy. It seems unlikely that a single-vendor solution will entirely answer hospital information processing needs. Therefore, a perpetuation of the heterogeneous environment is inevitable. With this in mind, an alternative approach is proposed: to develop networking standards for the hospital, as has been done for the manufacturing and technical office environment, such that vendors can build systems that can be easily integrated.