Division of Medical Informatics (DIM), University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Geneva, Switzerland

The six Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) are a 2'200-bed consortium of primary, secondary, tertiary and long-term care public hospitals, admitting 43'000 patients in 1999 and 550'000 outpatient visits. Over 23 years, the HUG informatics staff (150+ collaborators) has built a world-renowned hospital information system (DIOGENE) that serves as the backbone for an ambitious clinical computing programme. The Divison d'Informatique Médicale the HUG has been involved in medical informatics since 1971, when the first version of the project DIOGENE was first conceived. This transactional system was first launched in 1978 with a hospital record for all admitted patients. In the following years, DIM has realised different subsystems such as Laboratory Order and Results Report, X-ray Schedule and Reporting and different administrative components. In the 1980s, the DIOGENE system was extensively rewritten under the UNIX system, making use of a relational database fully adapted to the distributed architectures. In the 1990s, DIM replaced its computer terminals with stand-alone client PCs and implemented a large network. New emphasis has been given to medical applications.

Research activities include medical knowledge representation, natural language processing, distributed knowledge management, data mining and knowledge discovery, innovative clinician-machine interface, advanced medical image processing for surgery planning and neuroscience research, telemedicine and health-networks, and internet-based learning.

The tight integration of the research, education and clinical service activites of the Division of Medical Informatics inside the Geneva University Hospitals provides a unique platform for the development and deployment of innovative real-world informatics solutions for care providers and patients.

HUG has been implicated in different research projects of the EU since 1990: HELIOS (phases 1 and 2), DOME, GALEN, GALEN-IN-USE, GAMES, SYNAPSES and SynEx. It has developed expertise in multiple domains, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprising analysis as well as generation processes, Middleware Engineering and Image Processing. It has given particular attention to the domain of medical terminology for patient encoding and has developed internal products with good user-acceptance. It has recently launched a large project involving electronic medical records for all patients in the hospitals.