There is a conflict between the desire for increasingly complex and robust decision-support applications and the reality of deploying them in legacy systems in existing clinical settings. The hardware and software environments at a clinical site can often conspire to complicate this deployment process. These difficulties can be increased when deploying research-based decision-support systems because of the limited administrative and staffing resources typically available to such systems. We addressed these problems by designing a client-server framework for rapid deployment of a decision-support system in a resource-constrained environment. This framework minimizes the resources required of client machines and also simplifies administrating the decision-support applications on those machines. We deployed a decision-support system developed using this framework at a hospital within the Department of Veterans Affairs.
