[Development of information system at Sestre Milosrdnice Clinical Hospital].

Information Systems (IS) in healthcare are complex with a heterogeneous structure. They support decision making in healthcare and therefore must be integrated, consistent, reliable, secure and simple for use and maintenance. Data entry is strongly controlled, data are coded and ready for inventory printing or scientific analysis. Efforts in developing the Integrated Hospital Information System (IHIS) at Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital, Zagreb (Croatia) from a Hospital Information System (HIS) are presented. From the very beginning, the Information System was developed without planning, only to satisfy the current needs and to stay within financial possibilities. Today, many hospital departments have their own Information Subsystems and one or two servers. All local area networks and offline computers are connected to optical ring and through the farm of servers (firewall, www, e-mail, DNS-Domain Name System) to the Internet. We need a long time to achieve the current degree of development of IS. However, today we can obviously recognize a few layers of information applications just like business application, medicine application, scientific application, education application, telemedicine and Internet application. Very powerful information technology and very fast progress in communications leads to digital or paperless hospital.