The deployment of a World Wide Web (W3) based medical information system

The development of Web technologies has revolutionized information dissemination on the Internet. The University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic's Web Clinical Information System (CIS) demonstrates the use of the Web as an infrastructure for deploying a medical information system at a fraction of the developmental cost of more traditional client server systems. This Web CIS has been deployed since December 1994. It makes available laboratory results, including a radically improved clinical microbiology reporting system, ad hoc laboratory order entry, and an embedded expert system protocol laboratory ordering system. It provides these services to any physician or patient care area with TCP (or SLIP/PPP) connection to our hospital network backbone, whether the client computer is running MS Windows, the Macintosh OS, or X-Windows. A formal evaluation of one of this systems subcomponents, the display of clinical microbiology information, demonstrated a significant savings in clinician time (43% p < .001) and substantial reduction in interpretive errors (0 vs 15 p < .01).