OCIS - 15-YEARS EXPERIENCE WITH PATIENT-CENTERED COMPUTING

In the mid-1970s, the medical and administrative staff of the Oncology Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital recognized a need for a computer-bas ed clinical decision-support system that organized patients' informati on according to the care continuum, rather than as a series of event-s pecific data. This is especially important in cancer patients, because of the long periods in which they receive complex medical treatment a nd the enormous amounts of data generated by extremely ill patients wi th multiple interrelated diseases. During development of the Oncology Clinical Information System (OCIS), it became apparent that administra tive services, research systems, ancillary functions (such as drug and blood product ordering), and financial processes should be integrated with the basic patient-oriented database. With the structured approac h used in applications development, new modules were added as the need for additional functions arose. The system has since been moved to a modern network environment th the capacity for client-server processin g.