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KMID : 0603819960020020502
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Journal of Experimental & Biomedical Science
1996 Volume.2 No. 2 p.502 ~ p.510
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The Superiority of M-Technology for the Hospital Information System
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Jeon, Hee Sun
Kwak, Yun Sik/Cho, Hune/Kim, Hyung Soo/Jang, Soo Yong
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Abstract
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Ajou University Hospital is a 900-bed tertiary care teaching hospital with approximately 140 medical staff, 200 house staff and 450 registered nurse.
They treat on an average 850 inpatients and approximately 2,000 outpatients daily.
There is also a 36-bed Emergency Care Unit which is the majer trauma referral center in the region.
To support the above clinical activities, ATOM-1 (Ajou Total Medical Information System-1), open distributed system, has been developed since November, 1990 and was implemented in June, 1994 when the hospital was newly opened.
The hardware of the system consists of 23 Unisys Servers (U6000/65X19 and U6000/85X4), 300 PCs, 170 Workstations, and 240 Printers.
The network is with FDDI backbone, and also run by TCP/IP, Ingres/Net and 5 bridge routers.
The Client is SUN (Sparc Classic).
The client user interface is on SUN Motif(OSF/Motif).
The software was written in Windows/4GL and C for client and Vision, C, COBOL (MF) for servers.
The DBMS is Ingres v6.4 and the operating system is Unix SVR4.
The applications include Order communication system for all physician orders, Admission, Dischange, Transfer, Scheduling, Patients Registration, Pathology, Laboratory, Blood Bank, Pharmacy, Dietetics, x-ray, Nuclear Medicine, Physiological Function Tests, Account Receivables, Billing, Medical Record Tracking, Physical Therapy, Radiation Therapy and Nursing.
The total investments so far are as follows : (1) hardware cost was $6 million ; and (2) Software development cost was $4 million.
One and a half years after implementing the system, user satisfaction has been high.
However, there are serious drawbacks of the system, such as (1) RDBMS has very high overhead cost for the servers ; (2) data processing has been relatively slow as compare to that by MUMPS DBMS and server shadowing is not possible; and consequently the hardware cost has been very high.
Therefore, it’s been decided in early 1995 to convert the ATOM-1 to open M based down sized system from Ingres based without change of system architecture in order to lower the hardware cost and to improve system performance.
The entire system except outpatient order entry was converted to open M based in early November, 1996.
The outpatient order entry has been on SUN Spare C workstation which cannot be ported to open M at present.
In the meantime, Material and Inventory Management and Cost Analysis Systems using open M had been developed and implemented.
Therefore, there has been a unique opportunity to compare the performance of Ingres and Open M as the database management system for the hospital information system.
The outcome was remarkable in that open M showed on an average 50 times faster data processing time in a simulated condition but 8 times faster in the real time processing.
The server memory and CPU requirement was one third of that of Ingres.
In Conclusion, a Client/Server based open distributed hospital information system with open M shows a superior performance than with Ingres;that is 8 times faster data processing time and 1/3 of server memory and CPU requirements.
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