IMPLEMENTING A PHYSICIANS WORKSTATION USING CLIENT-SERVER TECHNOLOGY AND THE DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT

PWS is a physician's workstation research prototype developed to explo re the use of information management tools by physicians in the contex t of patient care. The original prototype was implemented in a client/ server architecture using a broadcast message server. As we expanded t he scope of the prototyping activities, we identified the limitations of the broadcast message server in the areas of scalability, security, and interoperability. To address these issues, we reimplemented PWS u sing the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). We describe the rationale for using DCE, the migration process, and the benefits achieved. Future work and recommendations are discus sed.