Collaborative health care information system development through sharable infrastructure, services, and paradigms

The Decision Systems Group has focused for several years on software architectures and software engineering approaches to support collaborative development for health care information systems. The goal is to be able to more readily develop complex applications that require integration of a variety of information resources. Our efforts are aimed at four primary capabilities: (1) a software environment, Arachne, for developing applications by incorporation of components created by disparate developers, developing component classes, for providing cross-platform graphical user interface support with remote rendering, and incorporating evolving software engineering standards; (2) a library of domain-specific components for medical applications; (3) a user interaction paradigm that provides a framework for applications that integrate both clinical data and other information resources for education and decision support; and (4) improved understanding of the collaborative process per se and the development of methodologies to support it.