Care settings for older people, such as nursing homes, can have low levels of social interaction, which has been shown in many studies as being crucial to both the mental and physical well-being of older adults. Furthermore, increased social interaction has been shown to have a positive effect on adjustment in institutions for the aged. However, these social connections can be lost due to movement within the care system, with residents regularly relocating for a variety of reasons including cost and medical issues. Eleven health professionals and six residents living in a care home in Ireland were interviewed about their social activities and levels of engagement within the home. Storyboards were then developed and presented to the residents based on these interviews. Findings from the interviews indicate that activity levels among the more cognitively able residents are quite low due to activities catering for the less able residents. Furthermore, a lack of access to information and resources (such as books and newspapers) means that these more able residents reported experiencing long periods of boredom. Technology can potentially allow residents access to such information and resources, enabling them to pursue activities in their personal time which can then also be used as the basis for group discussions. The use of technology could, in addition, allow those residents who had moved out of the home to continue to participate and collaborate in activities with the other residents.

The discovery of biomarkers and the underlying causes of diseases are enabled through the analysis of biological samples and data stored in biobanks. Biological samples and their associated data are expensive to collect and maintain, and it is important to store and manage them efficiently. During processing, samples and data go through a number of procedures and techniques, which are often in different locations and by individuals with different access permissions. It is essential to maintain the link between the samples and their associated data throughout the processes they undergo. This paper presents a novel system of tracking samples and data from collection through processing to storage and retrieval, which is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. This system ensures the security and reliability of sample data as well as location-independent recording and updating of sample data, as they move along the workflow.

Computer-based support for the incorporation of clinical practice guidelines and protocols into daily practice has recently attracted a lot of research interest within the healthcare informatics area. The aim is not only to provide support for the flexible specification and execution of clinical guidelines or protocols but also the dynamic management of these guidelines or protocols. This paper presents a framework and architecture for the management of clinical protocols whose specification and execution models are based on the event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm.

Abstract Requirements elicitation has been reported to be the stage of software development when errors have the most expensive consequences. Users usually find it difficult to articulate a consistent and complete set of requirements at the beginning of a development project. Prototyping is considered a powerful technique to ease this problem by exposing a partial implementation of the software system to the user, who can then identify required modifications. When prototyping data‐intensive applications a so‐called prototype database is needed. This paper investigates how a prototype database can be built. Two different approaches are analysed, namely test databases and sample databases; the former populates the resulting database with synthetic values, while the latter uses data values from an existing database. The application areas that require prototype databases, in addition to requirements analysis, are also identified. The paper reports on existing research into the construction of both types of prototype databases, and indicates to which type of application area each is best suited. This paper advocates for the use of sample databases when an operational database is available, as is commonly the case in software maintenance and evolution. Domain‐relevant data values and integrity constraints will produce a prototype database which will support the information system development process better than synthetic data. The process of extracting a sample database is also investigated. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

When the general press refers to 'software' in its headlines, then this is often not to relate a success story, but to expand on yet another 'software-risk-turned-problem-story.'

We believe that the typical hospital computing environment is especially fruitful as a domain for investigating the problems of interoperability and cooperation. We state this belief as hospital computing environments consist of a heterogeneous collection of autonomous information systems. These systems range from centralised hospital-wide systems, such as patient administration systems, to departmental systems such as pharmacy stock-control, laboratory information systems, accident and emergency systems and so on. Many of these are legacy systems which have been operating for many years and are difficult to integrate and virtually impossible to rewrite. In this article we discuss and assess the work of the Jupiter Project and its successor LIOM (Legacy system Interoperability using Object-oriented Methods).

The ability to exchange in a meaningful, secure, and simple fashion relevant healthcare data about patients is seen as vital in the context of efficient and cost-effective shared or team-based care. The electronic healthcare record (EHCR) lies at the heart of this information exchange, and it follows that there is an urgent need to address the ability to share EHCR's or parts of records between carers and across distributed health information systems. This paper presents the Synapses approach to sharing based on a standardized shared record, the Federated Healthcare Record, which is implemented in an open and flexible manner using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The architecture of the Federated Healthcare Record is based on the architecture proposed by the Technical Committee 251 of the European Committee for Standardization.

Legacy information systems typically form the backbone of the information flow within an organisation and are the main vehicle for consolidating information about the business. These systems also pose considerable problems: brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, nonextensibility, lack of openness etc., the so called legacy system problem which opens up a new research topic, legacy system migration. This paper provides a brief review of the main issues involved in legacy information systems migration.

The problems posed by mission-critical legacy systems: brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, non-extensibility, lack of openness etc., are well known, but practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Most approaches are "ad hoc" and tailored to peculiarities of individual systems. This paper presents an approach to mission-critical legacy system migration: the Butterfly methodology, its data migration engine and supporting toolkit framework. Data migration is the primary focus of the Butterfly methodology, however, it is placed in the overall context of a complete legacy system migration. The fundamental premise of the Butterfly methodology is to question the need for parallel operation of the legacy and target systems during migration. Much of the complexity of the current migration methodologies is eliminated by removing this interoperation assumption.

This paper describes the approach to information sharing being adopted by Synapses, a pan-European project funded under the EU Health Telematics Programme. The emphasis in Synapses is on developing standards to enable sharing, in whole or in part, of electronic healthcare records between distributed healthcare providers and institutions. The current technological solutions available for data sharing, including federated database systems, gateways, data warehousing, messaging and the web are insufficient on their own to meet the needs of Synapses. Thus in Synapses several different, but complementary technologies are merged in an open, distributed object-oriented environment. Furthermore, in order to safeguard the legal, ethical and clinical integrity of the record, it is essential not only to preserve the meaning of the data being transferred, but also its context and structure. Synapses solves this problem by defining a standard architecture for the federated electronic healthcare record.

The problems posed by mission-critical legacy systems-e.g., brittleness, inflexibility, isolation, non-extensibility, lack of openness-are well known, but practical solutions have been slow to emerge. Generally, organisations attempt to keep their legacy systems operational, while developing mechanisms which allow the legacy systems to interoperate with new, modern systems which provide additional functionality. The most mature approach employs gateways to provide this interoperability. However, gateways introduce considerable complexity in their attempt to maintain consistency between the legacy and target systems. This paper presents an innovative gateway-free approach to migrating legacy information systems in a mission-critical environment: the Butterfly Methodology. The fundamental premise of this methodology is to question the need for the parallel operation of the legacy and target systems during migration.