A practical object-oriented approach to a development of a next generation hospital information system

Abstract

KIND (stands for Kyushu university hospital Information Network Database) is a five years project, which aims to provide integrated services for patients, physicians, researchers and other hospital staffs. The final product of KIND is a next generation hospital information system. A physicians' clinical workstation, for example, integrated into a secured medical information network, can electronically develop a longitudinal medical record and interface with pharmacies, laboratories, medical specialists, and radiologists, as well as develop patient census and demographic profiles, in addition to doing electronic claims. Since clinical requirements on those medical records may vary for each case, we would like to have an essential data model under the hood. We decided to introduce domain analysis method to produce a relevant domain model. A domain analysis method captures the nature of business and helps us have an essential and extensible data model. Although there are several ways to describe a domain model, we chose an object-oriented description and consequently implementation using an object-oriented database system. Once we could have a decent domain model and implemented it as an object-oriented data model, application programs can utilize those data very easy without worrying extra efforts like finding complex queries including multiple joins. More over, if an application uses decent object-oriented technologies, it allows a user to access whole aspects of data transparently. This paper describes the architecture of KIND (the system) and outlines our domain model. In this paper, we also describe a practical application of several object-oriented technologies to develop a next generation hospital information system.