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* Building its patient care systems on the backbone of a large database, Shands Hospital at the University of Florida is taking a "low-tech approach" to the high-tech practice of running a health care center.
"We call it low-tech because we swept up all the data we could find in our computer systems and put it in this repository database," said Dr. John Cuddeback, vice president of information services at Shands, the focal point for the University of Florida's College of Medicine.
This approach allows Shands to concentrate on streamlining vast amounts of information without having to replace its paper medical records. Even more importantly, the changes do not demand radical adjustment from users.
IN THE MIDDLE
Nearing the midpoint of a four-year transition to client/server computing, the hospital is building core patient systems and decision support on top of a single Oracle Corp. relational database management system running on an IBM Enterprise System/9000 Model 640, which supports a network of 76 Novell, Inc. servers and more than 2,500 terminals and PCs.