A custom‐designed computer network for a dental clinical school

Abstract

A local area computer network has been designed and implemented to service predominantly the patient-related administrative needs of the Westmead Dental Clinical School. The appropriate software has been developed in-house over a period of time and introduced as the complexity and volume of the tasks increased and as more sophisticated hardware became available. The present arrangement utilizes NEC APC III and NEC APC IV computers with ACSinet networking hardware added to an OMNInet system. Primary functions include the management of extensive patient waiting lists (up to 16,000), treatment lists and laboratory work flow, as well as the provision of a wide range of related statistical information. Wordprocessing is a large scale daily activity. More specialized secondary functions include monitoring of patients allocated to dental students, support of the management of appointments, recalls, mailing lists and some specific research projects including data collection for a quality assurance programme. The network functions separately but simultaneously alongside an extensive hospital-wide VAX cluster and has greatly simplified the handling and management of a vast array of data essential to the management and evaluation of the treatment provided in the Dental Clinical School.