A brief historical overview of hospital information system (HIS) evolution in the United States.

This paper describes the evolution of hospital information systems (HIS) in the United States of America from 1950 to the present and defines HIS within the context of a medical information system. After a concise review of HIS administrative functions, the paper focuses on HIS clinical functions, including the following: computer-based patient records; data entry and retrieval; text processing; data and system protection; networks; clinical subsystems (nursing and medical subspecialties); clinical decision support and quality assurance; and research databases. The paper surveys early examples of HIS and makes projections for HIS in the 1990s.