Software Tools for Rapid Development and Customization of Medical Information Systems

When medical information system (MIS) development process starts, users (medical institutions) usually wants to cover fi-nancial and reporting part of system. Logically, since they need to manage their funds in order to make its business runs sustaina-bly. Second stage is then developing system segment that will cover document management and detail medical data collecting in order to support further data analysis. Also, collected medical data can be used in different forms both for consequent researches and in education process of future medical staff [1]. Main user of MIS we have implemented is Clinic Centre Nis (CCN) [2] si-tuated in South Serbia. CCN consists of 22 different specialist clinics providing wide range of medical services and offering hun-dreds of possible specialist examinations, lab analysis and therapeutic treatments. In the same tame CCN is also a place where future doctors, specialists and physicians, students of Medical Faculty of University of Nis [3], take their practical exercises.

When we talk about medical data collecting, developing MIS should support general healthcare process and provide specialist doctors with valid forms that can help them in collecting medical data and generating reports [4]. Each different medical examination should have related forms with appropriate fields, and, usually, each form should have mapping table in the database where data has to be stored. Creating data tables, then data object model entities and supporting forms, at the end, is pretty annoying and long lasting process, so we decided to create a software tool that will speed up this process as much is possible; also, for each medical functionality there can be defined many different medical examination, lab analysis, therapeutic treatment reports and many other different documents [5]. Luckily, all those documents have much of similar functionalities ? all of them become part of electronic health record, all of them have link to patient, and all of them must be “signed” by a doctor or physician.

We are working on a MIS that should be developed to satisfy needs of Serbian public health system, both its ambulatory and hospital part. Also, our MIS is a result of a project supported by Serbian Ministry of Science and Ministry of health. Main objective of research, which results are provided by this paper, is to make process of specialists’ supporting module development (SSM) faster and more efficient. SSM consists of many different forms where every form supports one specific medical examination.

Since each medical specialization can be covered with many different examinations, it results in many different forms that should be created. Also, every form contains many different visual components, which means different fields. From the other side all these examination supporting forms share much of functionality and, generally, one can say that they have just different layout. Knowing these facts it is easily understandable that we needed some data modeling and form generating tools that can make our developing process faster and more reliable.

Our general strategy is extension of existing system with new components that will allow creating of elements that will be incor-porated in existing modules. System is organized in several layers: database (SQL Server 2005), data object model (Entity Framework), virtual EHR (Electronic Health Record), synchronization services and user applications and modules.

Extension of existing system was in developing of data modeling and form generating tool that will allow user to create data meta model on one place and then generate related tables in database, new entity framework objects (and update entity framework model), define visual search components (and incorporate it in component library), generate windows and ASP.NET web forms that can be included in different user modules, generate translation resources to enable Multilanguage support, and to generate reporting profile that should be used in our reporting tool [6].

Software Tools for Rapid Development and Customization of Medical Information Systems
Some requirements and challenges
The overall system architecture
• A. The Medical Data Meta Model
• B. Generated tables in the DB
• C. Data object model variants
• D. Building translation resources
• E. Generating forms
• F. Generated visual overview component
• G. Reporting profile
• H. Generic search component
• I. Building medical data retrieving application
Conclusion and future work