Evolution of a cardiovascular information system.

The competitive nature of our evolving health care system mandates a concomitant increase in the level of sophistication of the cardiovascular information system. The new paradigms in health care also mandate a re-engineering of the process of data collection and analysis. This paper deals with a variety of hardware, software, and human issues encountered at our institution. Topics covered include implementation of service line management, utilization of an interdisciplinary medical informatics model, database conversion, and application development. Special attention will be paid to the development of a system which is a comprehensive information system for clinical and financial management of the cardiovascular patient, not just a quality-of-care database.