INTEGRATING LEGACY LABORATORY INFORMATION-SYSTEMS INTO A CLIENT-SERVER WORLD - THE UNIVERSITY-OF-MINNESOTA CLINICAL WORKSTATION (CWS) PROJECT

The development of an innovative clinical decision-support project suc h as the University of Minnesota's Clinical Workstation initiative man dates the use of modern client-server network architectures. Preexisti ng conventional laboratory information systems (LIS) cannot be quickly replaced with client-server equivalents because of the cost and relat ive unavailability of such systems. Thus, embedding strategies that ef fectively integrate legacy information systems are needed. Our strateg y led to the adoption of a multi-layered connection architecture that provides a data feed from our existing LIS to a new network-based rela tional database management system. By careful design, we maximize the use of open standards in our layered connection structure to provide d ata, requisition, or event messaging in several formats. Each layer is optimized to provide needed services to existing hospital clients and is well positioned to support future hospital network clients.