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A Tcl/Tk Based Graphical Interface to Medical
and Administrative Information

Charles Webster¹, MD, MSIE, MSIS, Andrew Pople², Roseanne Silva³, MSIN,
Xiaofeng Wang⁴, MS, Sean McLinden¹, MD

¹Dept. of Health Information Sciences, Duquesne University
²Carnegie Group Inc., ³Fiserv Inc., ⁴Shadyside Hospital, Pittsburgh PA

18th Annual Symposia on Computer Applications in Medical Care

**Abstract**
FELIX is an front-end application processor, with an open systems back-end, that provides a uniform and intuitive interface to clinical and administrative information. It consists of an information browser, three clinical applications, and three management applications. FELIX was developed in a community hospital environment, but has conceptual and technical roots in medical informatics and the Internet.

INTRODUCTION

FELIX (FELIX Enables Limitless Information Exploration) provides a generic graphical interface for browsing medical and administrative information. FELIX relies on a large number of industry standards such as TCP/IP, X11R5, SQL and SQL-II, Postscript and SGML. In particular, the interface was developed using a high-level X-windows graphical scripting language called Tcl/Tk (Ousterhout, 1990, 1991,1994). We used real patient information and based our targeted applications on analysis of
patient care processes at a local urban community referral hospital. We intended FELIX to be a vision of what is possible, a prototype to force us to confront the necessary integration of disparate technologies, and an inducement for clinicians and administrators to press for open systems file formats, programmatic interfaces and network protocols.