Designing a low cost bedside workstation for intensive care units.

The paper describes the design and implementation of a software architecture for a low cost bedside workstation for intensive care units. The development is fully integrated into the information infrastructure of the existing hospital information system (HIS) at the University Hospital of Giessen. It provides cost efficient and reliable access for data entry and review from the HIS database from within patient rooms, even in very space limited environments. The architecture further supports automatical data input from medical devices. First results from three different intensive care units are reported.