The medical community has traditionally utilized a common set of materials for diagnosis, documentation, and communicating about patients. These materials tend to be independently created, separately analyzed, but are used by medical personnel as an integrated set to deal with a particular patient. Included in such materials are patient history, problem symptoms, diagnostic imaging (X-Rays, MRI, PET, bone scans), patient logs, hospital specialist analysis, and consulting physician conclusions, treatments and results. Further records, such as hospital equipment used, drugs and materials used, facilities and personnel used, are all elements to be itemized and bills, insurance records, and forms are required for payment. Each of these medical elements can be created and captured as a separate object instance which can then be arrayed in a hierarchy in direct association with a particular patient.The advantage of employing objects to represent, display, store and transmit medical information is that objects encapsulate into a single entity all the elements required to use this medical information. An object contains the required data whether it be a document or an image. The object also contains information about the document such as who created it, who is authorized to use it, how big it is, and what special formats or data types are used. The most powerful thing about an object is that the program or method which operates against the data or document is encapsulated within the object along with the data to be processed. Therefore one need not acquire and run a special program to process the object since the required program is enclosed in the object. Finally, a messaging program is enclosed in the object as well to send messages to other objects if their assistance is required. Thus an object is a self contained entity. A physician, researcher, technician, or nurse can retrieve an object and merely execute it. One need not load a program, then download data, and finally run the program against the data. The data and the program are encapsulated as a unit and executed as a unit. One retrieves the object and executes it. For further references on objects, there is Grady Booch's Object-Oriented Analysis and Design , Benjamin Cummings, 1994, and Won Kim's Introduction to Object Oriented Databases , MIT Press, 1990.
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Using medical objects: their structure, transmission, storage and usage
Groom, Frank M.
Follow ACM SIGBIO Newsletter
, Volume 15 (1)
Association for Computing Machinery – Jan 11, 1995
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