COOPERATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING WITH PERSONAL MOBILE INFORMATION TOOLS INHOSPITALS

Health-care professionals have a broad range of needs for information and cooperation while working at different points of care (e.g., outpa tient departments, wards, and functional units such as operating theat ers). Patient-related data and medical knowledge have to be widely ava ilable to support high-quality patient care. Furthermore, due to the i ncreased specialization of health-care professionals, efficient collab oration is required. Personal mobile information tools have a consider able potential to realize almost ubiquitous information and collaborat ive support. They enable Po unite the functionality of conventional to ols such as paper forms, dictating machines, and pagers into one tool, Moreover, they can extend the support already provided by clinical wo rkstations. An approach is described for the integration of mobile inf ormation tools with heterogeneous hospital information systems. This a pproach includes identification of functions which should be provided on mobile tools. Major functions are the presentation of medical recor ds acid reports, electronic mailing to support interpersonal communica tion, and the provision of editors for structured clinical documentati on. To realize those functions on mobile tools, we propose a document- based client-server architecture that enables mobile information tools to interoperate with existing computer-based application systems. Ope n application systems and powerful, partially wireless, hospital-wide networks are: the prerequisites for the introduction of mobile informa tion tools.