ON THE REPRESENTATION AND MANAGEMENT OF MEDICAL RECORDS IN A KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM

The need for adapting Hospital Information Systems (HISs) to new appli cations (aimed at clinical data management) and to the ever growing us er population requires an evolution from both the representation and t he usability points of view. The goal of this paper is to discuss the interdependencies of the advanced data representation models necessary to the new HISs and the interaction requirements. In particular, we p resent the technical approach taken in the MILORD (Multimedia Interact ion with Large Object-oriented Radiological and clinical Databases) pr oject to implement a departmental environment which integrates differe nt kinds of clinical data in a user-friendly and homogeneous way. The implementation platform of the MILORD system is based on results obtai ned in the KIWIS project, which produced an advanced knowledge-base en vironment for large database systems. The interaction with a HIS is an alyzed identifying the HIS-specific interaction tasks, the typical pha ses of the interaction with an information system, and the necessary i nteraction paradigms. In particular we describe the approach adopted i n KIWIS for overcoming the problem of querying object-oriented databas es and we discuss the new requirements that multimediality poses on th e interaction paradigms.