Vital Signs

A thin client is a networked computer that stores few programs locally and depends heavily on network resources. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: a server sizing stress test for an electronic patient record, a 910-bed hospital’s virtual desktop launch, a framework for a secure analytics platform, two single sign-on evaluations that also counted thin client savings, and a virtual desktop rollout for clinical research.

A touch screen is a display that doubles as an input device, so people operate the computer by touching it directly. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five studies: 96 head and neck cancer patients who used a touch-screen questionnaire, 80 scleroderma patients testing a touchscreen app, 40 adults with brain injury comparing tablet and paper cognitive tests, a review of user interfaces in radiology, and a review of microbes on touchscreens and UV disinfection doses.

A workstation is a computer, and often the area around it, set up to perform a defined set of tasks such as entering orders, recording notes, or reading images. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the HIPAA Security Rule meaning, then reviews four studies: a 64-item nurse station ergonomics tool tested at 133 stations, an 814-radiologist survey on musculoskeletal symptoms, a review of radiology workstation optimization, and a review of home teleradiology workstation requirements.

A health information system is a computer system that captures, stores, processes, communicates, and presents healthcare information, including patient medical record information. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five 2026 studies: an Ethiopian electronic community system that raised maternal continuum of care completion from 19.6 to 47.7 percent, a Somali facility assessment of 1,219 sites, a Tanzanian data quality review that found neonatal deaths under-captured, a Saudi evaluation of 490 providers, and a Ugandan co-design of death notification.

UDP, the User Datagram Protocol, sends short messages called datagrams between programs on a network without a connection or a guarantee of delivery. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the 1980 specification, then reviews six sources: RFC 768, a 5G telesurgery study that used UDP-based software to monitor latency and packet loss every 2 milliseconds, a hospital emergency tag system with an accuracy of 99.52 percent, an attack-detection model that reached 99.93 percent accuracy on UDP flood traffic, and a pair of healthcare IoT denial-of-service datasets.

Data archiving is the practice of moving data that is no longer in active use to separate storage for long-term retention, while keeping it indexed and searchable. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and how archiving differs from backup, then reviews six sources: a policy paper on preserving clinical records, the Manchester migration from about 1,000 legacy systems, a cost-benefit analysis of vendor neutral archives, a cloud PACS archive holding more than 450 TB, a pathology archive study, and the HIPAA documentation retention rule.

Open source is software whose source code is available to users, who can read and modify it. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and the Open Source Initiative’s ten criteria, then reviews five sources: a survey of 257 health facilities using electronic medical records in Rwanda, a mixed-methods study of OpenMRS and a commercial EHR in Philippine primary care, an integration of the Orthanc imaging server with OpenMRS, and a framework for transitioning a national EMR in Mozambique from an OpenMRS-based system.

A real-time location system, or RTLS, provides actionable information about the location, status, and movement of equipment and people, and the HIMSS Dictionary compares it to an indoor GPS for hospitals. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews six sources: a qualitative study of RTLS in 23 U.S. hospitals, crash cart tracking across 349 carts in 8 hospitals, tracking of mobile X-ray machines, use of RTLS to monitor mobilization after abdominal surgery, a falls study using mobile workstation coverage, and an emergency department study of how staff spend their time.

ERP, or enterprise resource planning, refers to management information systems that integrate and automate many business functions of an enterprise, such as the payroll, human resources, purchasing, inventory and supplies, budgets, and the general ledger. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a study of ERP in rural health care, the Scan4Safety supply chain program in NHS England, pharmacy inventory accuracy across multiple systems, an internal audit information system for hospital consumables, and lessons from a nurse workforce decision-support system that struggled to integrate HR and scheduling data.

NoSQL describes an approach to databases that moves away from the tables, columns, rows, and schemas of traditional relational systems and uses more flexible data models. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a comparative review of databases for standardized EHR data, a query interpreter that translates archetype queries into MongoDB, an openEHR benchmark dataset of more than 150 million records, a big data platform built on HBase, and a clinical data warehouse where NoSQL outperformed relational SQL by 40 to 69 percent on complex queries.

A wiki is server software that lets users create and edit web page content freely from any web browser. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: a systematic review of 25 medical wikis, a perspective on wiki-style clinical documentation, a three-year experience with a residency wiki, a wiki used as a radiology IT knowledge base, and a review of wikis in medical education.

A distributed ledger is a database that each participant, or node, in a large network holds and updates independently, with no central authority sending records to the others. It is also called distributed ledger technology, or DLT. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, then reviews five sources: a scoping review of 892 blockchain and DLT studies in health care, a systematic review of blockchain in EHRs, a proof of concept for patient opt-out management, a review of smart contracts in clinical trials, and a scoping review of self-sovereign identity.

Mobile device management is software that deploys, secures, monitors, integrates, and manages mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets in the workplace. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and NIST SP 800-124 Revision 2, then reviews five sources: a survey of 204 US health care organizations on clinical mobile device use, a BYOD security maturity model piloted at an Australian hospital, a study of BYOD adoption factors among 620 healthcare workers in Iran, a review of UK and Irish guidance on personal devices and messaging apps, and a survey of clinician perceptions.

A WLAN, or wireless local area network, is a local network that uses high-frequency radio waves in place of wires to link devices. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: NIST guidance on securing WLANs, a hospital study of wireless portable radiography that cut image availability time by 70 percent, a wireless tracking system for nurses, a case of WLAN interference with wireless ECG monitoring, and a transmission scheme for wireless telemedicine.

A legacy system is outdated hardware, software, or a programming language that remains in use even though upgraded versions exist, and it often cannot grow or interact with newer systems. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition and reviews five sources: nurses’ cognitive workload when moving from a legacy system to a commercial EHR, alert override rates in a legacy versus commercial EHR, EHR data migration options, an Ethiopian case study on overcoming legacy barriers to interoperability, and an openEHR approach to reusing legacy systems.

A virtual machine, or VM, is an isolated instance of an operating system and its applications running on shared hardware under a hypervisor, so one computer can act as many. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, NIST Special Publication 800-125 on full virtualization and its security concerns, a pediatric research network that deployed VMs to eight centers, and a reference architecture for medical devices that uses hypervisor-based separation.

Failover is a backup mode in which the functions of a failed or offline system component are taken over by a secondary component. This post explains the HIMSS Dictionary definition, why failover does not remove the need for downtime procedures, and the HIPAA contingency plan standard, then reviews five sources: a hospital analysis of 204 EHR downtime events, a laboratory study of downtime delays, a scoping review of downtime threats, a health system’s quarterly downtime exercises, and a resilience model for downtime planning.

A patient administration system, or PAS, is the hospital system that captures and stores patient identifying details and a record of each patient’s contacts with the hospital, and that supports admissions, transfers, discharges, and appointments. This post explains the term and reviews five studies: an ethnographic study of a rural PAS rollout across 10 agencies, a validation of 140 PAS outpatient records, a comparison of PAS and clinician-collected data, a child welfare data match of 1,683 children, and a review of keeping a national PAS sustainable.

VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, carries voice conversations over an internet connection instead of a traditional analog phone line by digitizing speech into packets and reassembling it in real time. This post explains how it works, what NIST says about its security challenges, and what three studies found: a pilot trial of therapy delivered by VoIP for youth with chronic tic disorders, a cochlear implant study of Skype versus conventional telephony, and a study of mobile VoIP versus standard mobile calls.

A practice management system is software that automates the transactions and workflows of a practice, such as capturing patient demographics, scheduling and registration, and revenue cycle management. This post explains what it does and how it connects to the EHR, what an academic health system study found about the time and cost of billing and insurance activities, what a survey of 49 practices found about EHR returns, and what a German survey of 201 general practitioners found about digital maturity.