If evidence-based medicine (EBM) is to become fully integrated with patient care then we believe it essential that reference sources must be readily available at the point of healthcare delivery and be seamlessly integrated with access to the medical record. We have employed a user-centred design approach to develop a prototype ward-based clinical workstation, which uses Web technology to provide consistency of both user and data interfaces. Two sources of information are required for our work: the first is an Electronic Patient Record (EPR); the second is the reference material. As a first stage towards a clinical workstation to support EBM, the most commonly required sources of reference material were identified using semi-structured interviews. A first prototype system to evaluate the potential for a workstation to support EBM was constructed by developing a Web-based interface to the hospital’s laboratory Results Reporting System (RRS). Links between this and the most commonly used reference sources identified in the semi-structured interviews were established. An evaluation of this prototype suggested a high acceptability of both the user interface and of the concept of a clinical workstation which allows access to both patient specific and reference data.

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A project - known as the Integrated Co operative Workspace (ICW) - sponsored under the Department of Trade and Industry / Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (DTI/EPSRC) Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW) Advanced Technology Programme, involves the Sheffield Area Health Authority as a demonstrator site for the technology and methods being developed within the project. The ICW project* is developing integrated methods and Open Standards-based software tools to facilitate enterprise-wide CSCW. This paper explains the business issues which provide the rationale for ICW, and describes each component of the ICW methods and tool sets, and the way the components fit together from a business perspective. The authors also report on the approaches developed within the project, which employ object-oriented extensions to information modelling techniques, allied to object- oriented process modelling and an enterprise information service. The notion of 'three views' of an organization is described as: • An information view. • A process view. • A human resources view is described. The discussion is within the context of a specific application, supporting collaborative management work in a health authority.

In this paper we present results from our research work on the parallel processing of knowledge-base systems, for which a new computational model has been developed. The focus here is on the preprocessing aspect of this model, which plays a crucial role in reducing the communication overheads and establishing a suitable environment for runtime processing. Algorithms have been developed for three operations: the clustering of hierarchies, their mapping to a processor network, and the determination of eflcient communication paths between hierarchies assigned to adjacent and non-adjacent processors. Throughout these operations speed is a primary goal, and the algorithms developed are designed to give good solutions in reasonable time, rather than to give optimal solutions.