User-specific interfaces for clinical data-management systems: an object-based approach.

Multiple user-specific visual interfaces are desirable in any computer-based clinical data-management system that is used by different people with different jobs to perform. The programming and maintenance problems of supporting multiple user interfaces to a single information system can be addressed by separating user-interface functionality from data-management subsystems, and by building user interfaces from object-based software components whose functionality is bound to an underlying server-client data-management architecture. Experience with this approach in a patient-tracking system suggests that this object-based approach is viable in the design of a user interface for a clinical information system.