THE HEALTH-CARE PROFESSIONAL MULTIMEDIA WORKSTATION - DEVELOPMENT ANDINTEGRATION ISSUES

Workstations for health care professionals provide access to distribut ed healthcare information systems. They are complex systems that have to manage, in a unified framework, the distributed and multimedia info rmation needed for optimal patient care. The objective is to provide t he end-user with a virtual and unified device that conceals the comple xity of the underlying information system. Integration and reuse of mo dular software components are important in the development of such a w orkstation. A reference set of evaluation criteria is proposed that in cludes functional, technical, organizational, medical, cultural and et hical, economic and industrial components.