A 3-LEVEL GRAPH-BASED MODEL FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF HOSPITAL INFORMATION-SYSTEMS

Information processing in hospitals, especially in university hospital s, is currently faced with two major issues: low-cost hardware and pro gress in networking technology leads to a further decentralization of computing capacity, due to the increasing need for information process ing in hospitals and due to economic restrictions, it is necessary to use commercial software products. This leads to heterogeneous hospital information systems using a variety of software and hardware products , and to a stronger demand for integrating these products and, in gene ral, for a dedicated methodology for the management of hospital inform ation systems to support patient care and medical research, We present a three-level graph-based model (3LGM) to support the systematic mana gement of hospital information systems. 3LGM can serve as a basis for assessing the quality of information processing in hospitals. 3LGM dis tinguishes between a procedural level for describing the information p rocedures (and their information interchange) of a hospital informatio n system and thus its functionality, a logical tool level, focusing on application systems and communication links, and a physical tool leve l with physical subsystems (e.g., computer systems) and data transmiss ion. The examples that are presented have been taken from the Heidelbe rg University Hospital Information System.