INTERFACE FOR PATIENT CONTEXT SHARING AND APPLICATION SWITCHING

In a medical information system, a facility is provided so that different application programs can share information about their current state, so that a user of these applications can move more efficiently among them. This facility includes a patient context interface (PCI) that each application can access by means of an application programming interface (API). This API provides mechanisms by which applications can register their identity and their interest in certain types of data and events. The PCI stores data received from applications for sharing with other applications, and the PCI notifies certain applications of events received from other applications. In operation, an application that is used to review data for a patient stores (in the PCI) an identification of the patient whose data is currently being reviewed, and another application retrieves (from the PCI) that patient identification so that it can automatically present that patient's data when the user switches to that application. In addition, an application can retrieve the names of other applications and can present these names to a user, so that the user can switch to one of those applications to review data that is related to data that the user is reviewing in the first application (e.g., data about the same patient).