A Demonstration of the MAClinical Workstation

Abstract Medical Students at the Georgetown University School of Medicine on clinical rotations at the University Hospital now have access to Macintosh IIs and ImageWriter IIs on the wards. The MACs are connected to the medical center's local area network (LAN) with access to the Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) and Library Information System (LIS) databases. The Intent of the Macintosh project is to provide students with workstations of the sort they will use in future medical practice and to instill information query habits in the daily clinical activities of physicians- in-training. Currently, there are eight MACs located in conference rooms around the hospital where students and residents hold teaching rounds and write admission notes. Faculty participating in the project have been loaned MACs. The student workstations at the hospital are designed to serve multiple educational purposes in the clinical setting. Primarily, students gain experience in medical informatics. Secondarily, but equally essential, students can use H&P Writer, a HyperCard stack developed at Georgetown with MacWrite and MacDraw to prepare the admission record on the patients they examine. Graphics, sketches and illustrations are part of the system. The work- stations have access to IAIMS/LIS databases, such as minIMEDLINE, Alerts/Current Contents, Physicians Data Query (PDQ), a Drug/Poison Information System and RECONSIDER, a diagnostic prompting system.