Defining clinical 'workstation'

Interest in the physician's workstation has increased, yet often seems to focus on technological issues. At Boston's Beth Israel Hospital, the Center for Clinical Computing includes heavily used clinical workstations. Their evolution over the past 20 years suggests design criteria: the workstation must be patient-centered, the interface must be uniform, and data acquisition must be addressed at a system level. However, it is clinical function that really defines a workstation. The workstation should do the following: display patient information rapidly and flexibly; assist with administrative tasks; facilitate communication; and provide four important types of decision support: access to literature, access to databases, clinical calculation, and 'synthetic vision,' or different views of patient data. The solutions to our healthcare problems are not in 'workboxes' we can buy, but in creative approaches we can imagine. We need a patient-centered infrastructure and a reduced workload for the clinician-perhaps a 'worklesstation'.