"HIS-Treck - The Next Generation": An Introduction to Future Hospital Information Systems

The ship by health care organizations to integrated care with an outpatient emphasis requires the development ofa new generation of multifaceted electronic medical record systems to coordinate these services. This paper introduces the context ofpresent day health care computing to set the stage for Dr. Essin's paper on our proposed paradigm shifr fiom record processing to document processing, using mark up language technologies. We believe that such document oriented systems can be designed to be both distributed and secure with respect to patient and institutional con9dentiality.