Design and processing issues for the health care professional workstation: summary and recommendations

The health care professional workstation is a window to a heterogeneous set of functions that need to be ported to various types of hardware for different types of users. Processing aspects, which belong with the interface, storage and communication, to the architectural dimension of the workstation should not be considered outside of a more comprehensive model including the user, function and time dimensions. Several recommendations, which could provide the appropriate environment for development and help maintain a viable approach as the variables change along the four dimensions of the workstation model, are proposed. They concern the adaptation of the enterprise infrastructure to integrate workstations, the need for a reference architecture for health care workstation development and recommendations for the evaluation and dissemination of results.