AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH-CARE INFORMATION-SYSTEMS FROM DISTRIBUTED COMPONENTS

Over the past several years, the Decision Systems Group has worked to develop software tools that facilitate the construction of highly inte grated, customizable health care information systems and clinical work station environments. Today's medical software industry is based prima rily on large, single-vendor systems with relatively poor integration capabilities, and has not yet embraced newer approaches which could fo ster rich integration and customization of multi-vendor ''component-ba sed'' systems. This is due in large part to lack of common software in frastructure, services, and paradigms. With the aim of providing ourse lves and our collaborators with the ability to construct richly intero perating software components in the near-term, we have developed a sui te of cross-platform software tools, collectively referred to as Arach ne. These tools are being distributed freely to the Internet community , and are the basis for ongoing investigation of the component softwar e development paradigm. This approach has a number of advantages for f uture health care information systems.