HERMES - A HEALTH-CARE WORKSTATION INTEGRATION ARCHITECTURE

An architecture is described that facilitates integration of existing databases and applications without modifying them. By means of this ar chitecture, data from different sources dispersed in a network can be combined and directly used in existing applications or applications th at have been developed specially for integration. This feature of comb ining data from different sources into one workstation is viewed as th e enabling technology on which computer-based patient records can be b uilt. The abstraction of computer-, network- and application-specific details is completely dealt with by the integration architecture. This integration architecture has been developed with extendibility and fl exibility in mind, and allows for a growth-path towards application of the open system paradigm in medicine.