MUSEŽ Applications Programming Interface General Information
The MUSEŽ API
"Open Database Access with Intelligence"
Many health care organizations and companies are embarking on projects to create a
"longitudinal patient record." The goal of these projects is to create software
that accesses all of the data on a single patient within a common navigation scheme/user
interface. Clearly the cardiology data that resides in the MUSE CV Information System
should be part of that patient record. However, simply providing access to the data
without providing access to the knowledge of how to format that data for display would be
of limited value. Reinventing all of the logic necessary to decompress, scale, anti-alias,
etc., the waveform, text, and image information stored on MUSE would be a huge
undertaking. Nor is it desireable to duplicate all of the data in the MUSE on another
information system and introduce the problems associated with keeping both data sets
"in synch."
The MUSE API provides open data access combined with the intelligence necessary to
format the data for display. Specifically, the MUSE API provides the programmer with the
opportunity to add the following functions to their application:
- Connecting and disconnecting dynamically from a MUSE system on the network.
- Finding a given patient in the MUSE database.
- Determining how many and which type of tests exist for a given patient.
- Generating a displayable and/or printable bitmap image of any report.
The programmer can then write a Windows application program which provides these
functions to their end-user while maintaining a constant look and feel. This also allows
databases from multiple sources to be easily combined so that the different data sources
or back-end systems are transparent to the user.
Essentially, the API allows the programmer to utilize Marquette's years of experience
in displaying Cardiology information without having to learn all of the details. And it
offers the flexibility to integrate that knowledge and information with other end-user
systems.
Supported Image Formats for Reports
The data needs to be faithfully reproduced on the screen and printer in the formats
that the clinician understands and expects. The MUSE Applications software allows creation
of bitmaps which present the information to the clinician precisely as the report would
appear printed via a thermal or laser printer. Reports can be formatted into the following
image formats:
- Portable Document Format (Adobe Acrobat PDF)
- JPEG
- Group 3 FAX
- Postscript Level 2
- Windows Bitmap (BMP)
- Windows 16 and 32 Bit Metafiles
- ASCII Text (No Waveforms)
- HTML (No Waveforms)
- PCL-5
- Placeable MetaFiles (Powerbuilder)
Supported Development Environments
The MUSE API is available only on 32-Bit Windows platforms, i.e. Win 95 and Windows NT.
The code is called via the Windows DLL mechanisms and demonstration programs have been
written using Microsoft Visual C/C++ 4.0X, Microsoft Visual Basic, Borland Delphi 2.01,
and Powerbuilder version 5. |
