BEYOND CLIENTS AND SERVERS

Computer scientists working in medical informatics have to face the pr oblem that software offered by industry is more and more adopted for c linical use by medical professionals. A new challenge arises of how to combine commercial solutions with typical medical software that alrea dy exists for some years and proved to be reliable with these off-the- shelf solutions [1]. With the HERMES project, this new challenge was a ccepted and possible solutions to integrate existing legacy systems wi th state-of-the-art commercial solutions have been investigated. After a period of prototyping to assess possible alternative solutions, a s ystem based on an indirect client-server model was implemented with he lp of the industry. In this paper, its architecture is described toget her with the most important features currently covered. Based on the H ERMES architecture, both systems for clinical data analysis and patien t care (cardiology) are currently developed.