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It doesn’t really matter how you look at it, the promises of the computer revolution, the information highway, or whichever snappy title you give it have been slow to appear. The technology has clearly leapt ahead, and the concept of a clinical workstation is well established, but the practicalities have been difficult to resolve.
What is a clinical workstation?
Evolving technology has provided an increasing variety of tools to help the clinician. Many of these have been developed individually, using different machines in different areas. The concept of the workstation was created to amalgamate these technologies and tools into a single ‘computer’ allowing access to all its different components from a single environment. The clinician can then perform multiple tasks from a single site, collecting data from many different sources, and reducing the wastage of duplicating data entry. This ‘comprehensive’ definition of a workstation is not universally applied, but is one used by most authors,1 2 although others use the term for any system that interprets data intelligently or even one that collates complex imaging.3
‘PC’ FACILITIES
We must all by now be familiar with the basic functions of a desk top computer. Word processing is perhaps the most fundamental of these, but they can also include many other commonly used programs. Spreadsheets and databases (Excel, Access, FoxPro, etc) allow data handling so that local information can be stored. Programs such as Powerpoint generate slides and there are many programs (Papyrus, Reference Manager, etc) that allow the storage and recall of references. These latter will often allow the automatic entry of data from disc or on line sources, allowing storage of a greater volume of data, such as abstracts. Graphics and statistical packages (Graph, FigP, SPSS, Statview, etc) are further powerful desktop packages.
The development and universal availability of CD ROM has vastly increased the …