Common objectives in the industrial countries are the improvement of quality of care, clinical effectiveness, and cost control. Cost control, in particular, has been addressed through the introduction of case mix systems for reimbursement by social-security institutions.

More data is required to enable quality improvement, increases in clinical effectiveness and for juridical reasons. At first glance, this documentation effort is contradictory to cost reduction. However, integrated services for resource management based on better documentation should help to reduce costs. The clerical effort for documentation should be decreased by providing a co-operative working environment for healthcare professionals applying sophisticated human-computer interface technology. Additional services, e.g., automatic report generation, increase the efficiency of healthcare personnel.

Modelling the medical work flow forms an essential prerequisite for integrated resource management services and for co-operative user interfaces. A user interface aware of the work flow provides intelligent assistance by offering the appropriate tools at the right moment.

Nowadays there is a trend to client/server systems with relational databases or object-oriented databases as repository. The work flows used for controlling purposes and to steer the user interfaces must be represented in the repository.