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A Practical Approach to Process Support in Health Information Systems

Affiliations of the authors: Institute of Medical Informatics, Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany (RL, TE, KAK); GWI Research Council GmbH, Vienna, Austria (HS).

Correspondence and reprints: Richard Lenz, DrIng, Institute of Medical Informatids, Philipps-University, Marburg, Bunsen-strasse 3, D-35037, Marburg, Germany; e-mail: <lenzr{at}mailer.uni-marburg.de>

This article describes the design of a generator tool for rapid application development. The generator tool is an integral part of a healthcare information system, and newly developed applications are embedded into the healthcare information system from the very beginning. The tool-generated applications are based on a document oriented user interaction paradigm. A significant feature is the support of intra- and interdepartmental clinical processes by means of providing document flow between different user groups. For flexible storage of newly developed applications, a generic EAV-type (Entity-Attribute-Value) database schema is used. Important aspects of a consequent implementation, like database representation of structured documents, document flow, versioning, and synchronization are presented. Applications generated by this approach are in routine use in more than 200 hospitals in Germany.