title: [Communication server in the hospital--advantages, expenses and limitations].
abstract: The common situation in a hospital with multiple departments is a heterogeneous set of subsystems, one or more for each department. Today, we have a rising number of requests for an information interchange between these independent systems. The exchange of patients data has a technical and a conceptional part. Establishing a connection between more than two subsystems requires links from one system to all the others, each of them with its own code translation, interface and message transfer. A communication server is an important tool for significantly reducing the amount of work for the technical realisation. It reduces the number of interfaces, facilitates the definition, maintenance and documentation of the message structure and translation tables and helps to keep control on the message pipelines. Existing interfaces can be adapted for similar purposes. Anyway, a communication server needs a lot of configuration and it is necessary to know about low-level internetworking on different hard- and software to take advantage of its features. The code for writing files on a remote system and for process communication via TCP/IP sockets or similar techniques has to be written specifically for each communication task. There are first experiences in the university school of medicine in Mainz setting up a communication server to connect different departments. We also made a checklist for the selection of such a product.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Medizinische Statistik und Dokumentation, Klinikum der Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. jen@imsd.uni-mainz.de
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Jendrysiak
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000191:economics*; D003199:Computer Systems / Q000191:economics; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003628:Database Management Systems / Q000191:economics*; D005858:Germany; D006751:Hospital Information Systems / Q000191:economics*; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D012984:Software / Q000191:economics; D014584:User-Computer Interface