The Exam-Room Physician Workstation

摘要

By combining and configuring commercially available hardware and software, we have developed a networked system of exam-room physician workstations that provides a platform for physician charting, medical reference, and patient education. The physical platform consists of IBM compatible computers and ethernet hardware. The software platform is a hypertext document management system called Idex distributed on a Novell network. Key features of the workstation include a graphical user interface, hypertext information access, network file-locking, and a document management shell. Clinical experience with the workstation suggests that patients accept the presence of a computer in the exam-room and that a hypertext medical record provides the speed of information access necessary for exam-room computing.