A study on the impact of database design on clinical information systems.

This paper reports on a research project which aims at addressing one of the most crucial problems in clinical computing--the relation between clinical data and database design and their impacts on Clinical Information Systems. The discussion will focus on a research project that is currently being conducted in a number of acute care hospitals at Melbourne, Australia to investigate the database design for the Emergency Department Information System (EDIS), a subset of the Clinical Information System (CIS).