A SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPROACH FOR MEDICAL WORKSTATIONS DEVELOPMENT

Multimedia medical workstations represent the natural tool for accessi ng the hospital information system environment. They are complex medic al systems that have to gather, in a single framework, a large collect ion of components dealing with multimedia medical objects. To remain c urrent with both medical practice and with advances in the computer sc ience field, they have to allow the iterative addition of new function s to the set of existing ones. In this paper, after a survey of common ly required medical workstation functional components, we shall try to discuss how a software engineering approach can streamline the develo pment of a medical workstation. Different software engineering tools n eeded to build the functional components of a workstation are describe d. Their integration in a single dedicated environment is considered t hrough four perspectives: data, presentation, communication and contro l. Benefits and limitations of an object-oriented approach are discuss ed.