OCIS: 15 years' experience with patient-centered computing.

In the mid-1970s, the medical and administrative staff of the Oncology Center at Johns Hopkins Hospital recognized a need for a computer-based clinical decision-support system that organized patients' information according to the care continuum, rather than as a series of event-specific data. This is especially important in cancer patients, because of the long periods in which they receive complex medical treatment and the enormous amounts of data generated by extremely ill patients with multiple interrelated diseases. During development of the Oncology Clinical Information System (OCIS), it became apparent that administrative services, research systems, ancillary functions (such as drug and blood product ordering), and financial processes should be integrated with the basic patient-oriented database. With the structured approach used in applications development, new modules were added as the need for additional functions arose. The system has since been moved to a modern network environment with the capacity for client-server processing.

Integrated ambulatory care services in oncology.

In today's medical care environment of cost containment and restricted reimbursement, it is important to maximize the use of expensive facility and personnel resources. Concurrently, it is important to provide superior and timely patient services in order to remain competitive in an extremely flexible market. There are many areas in today's larger hospital environments where such ideals can be easily achieved. One of the more obvious areas is the automation of appointment and resource scheduling for ambulatory care services. This article focuses on maximizing the use of available physical and personnel resources in the ambulatory care setting of large and specialty hospitals. The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center's integrated outpatient scheduling and resource management systems are used as examples of what can be achieved. It is hoped that the experiences of the Oncology Center in developing these integrated systems will help others in similar efforts.

The Oncology Clinical Information System.

This presentation provides an overview of the functions of the Oncology Clinical Information System (OCIS) focusing on three new applications. The first part of the presentation will describe the structure of OCIS and show the basic clinical decision-support aspects of the system on-line. The second part of the presentation will provide on-line demonstrations of three new applications: a sophisticated blood products ordering systems, a chemotherapy and treatment scheduling system, and a radiation therapy scheduling system.