Cj. Mcdonald et al., CANOPY COMPUTING - USING THE WEB IN CLINICAL-PRACTICE, JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, 280(15), 1998, pp. 1325-1329
The rain forest canopy is a seamless web through which arboreal creatu
res efficiently move to reach the edible fruits without any atttention
to the individual trees. Individual health care computer systems are
rich with patient data, but rather than a canopy linking all the trees
in the forest, the data ''fruit'' come from a diverse forest of indiv
idual computer ''trees''-laboratory systems, word processing systems,
pharmacy systems, and the like. These different sources of patient inf
ormation are:difficult or impossible to reach by individual physicians
, especially from their offices. The World Wide Web and other standard
ization technology provide physicians and their institutions the tools
needed for seamless and secure access to their patients' data and to
medical information, when and where they need it. We and others have a
dopted these tools to combine independent sources of clinical data. Ph
ysicians who assist in the purchase of clinical information systems sh
ould demand products in their practice settings that are Web enabled,
use standard coding systems, and communicate with other computer syste
ms via broadly accepted protocols.