Distributed Processing Architecture for a Hospital Information System
Marvin L. Zeichner, Paul J. Brusil, Stephen G. Tolchin · Europe PMC (PubMed Central) · 1979
A distributed processing architecture can support existing hospital information handling areas and can expand to accommodate additional application areas. The elements of the proposed architecture consist of heterogeneous and autonomous minicomputer host processors that serve the needs of distinct application areas, intelligent terminals that access one or more of these processors, a bus communication system featuring a single common information flow channel, and microprocessor based interface units between each network subscriber (processor or terminal) and the communication bus. Information exchange occurs via transactions using a proposed set of standardized protocols between network subscribers. Control of the network has both distributed and centralized components, and permits overall network system reliability to be independent of subscriber reliability. Key issues to the viability of a distributed processing architecture are the distribution of the data base among subscriber elements, the methods for achieving distributed data base integrity and the techniques for failure recovery.