Abstract:
Today, the demand for medical decision support to improve the quality of patient care
and to reduce costs in health services is generally recognized. Nevertheless, decision
support is not yet established in daily routine within hospital information systems
which often show a heterogeneous architecture but offer possibilities of interoperability.
Currently, the integration of decision support functions into clinical workstations
is the most promising way. Therefore, we first discuss aspects of integrating decision
support into clinical workstations including clinical needs, integration of database
and knowledge base, knowledge sharing and reuse and the role of standardized terminology.
In addition, we draw up functional requirements to support the physician dealing with
patient care, medical research and administrative tasks. As a consequence, we propose
a general architecture of an integrated knowledge-based clinical workstation. Based
on an example application we discuss our experiences concerning clinical applicability
and relevance. We show that, although our approach promotes the integration of decision
support into hospital information systems, the success of decision support depends
above all on an adequate transformation of clinical needs.
Keywords
Knowledge-based Clinical Workstation - Multiple Use of Patient - Data - Decision Support
- Clinical Documentation - Management of Hospital - Information Systems
