An infrastructure for the development of health care information systems from distributed components

Over the past several years, the Decision Systems Group has worked to develop software tools that facilitate the construction of highly integrated, customizable health care information systems and clinical workstation environments. Today's medical software industry is based primarily on large, single‐vendor systems with relatively poor integration capabilities, and has not yet embraced newer approaches which could foster rich integration and customization of multi‐vendor “component‐based” systems. This is due in large part to lack of common software infrastructure, services, and paradigms. With the aim of providing ourselves and our collaborators with the ability to construct richly interoperating software components in the near‐term, we have developed a suite of cross‐platform software tools, collectively referred to as Arachne. These tools are being distributed freely to the internet community, and are the basis for ongoing investigation of the component software development paradigm. This approach has a number of advantages for future health care information systems. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.