In 1994, in collaboration with three hospital emergency departments, four HMO practice sites, five community health clinics, and fourteen homeless care sites, Regenstrief Institute began to design and implement the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC).  Features of this early system include a secure, wide-area network, a clinical data repository, a clinician's workstation, and a focus on standard vocabularies and data exchange.  This early network embodied the concept of the area-focused IAIMS and became the genesis for the current IAIMS vision.

The network provides e-mail services, Web access, electronic medical record access, medical library services and numerous special purpose functions (variously) at each institution. It also delivers clinical data to the central RMRS medical record system from a host of different departmental and administrative systems and provides care providers and researchers access to the RMRS. The network provides pathways for RMRS interfaces to seven laboratory systems, seven hospital registration systems, four dictation transcription systems, three radiology systems, three pharmacy systems, two different EKG cart systems, two surgery scheduling system, and more than 20 other systems.

Most of the larger interface flows are carried by HL7 messages.  We have standardized the terminology at six organizations. We use a common interface and one sign-on to link users to independent clinical files at multiple institutions and to other services (such as library knowledge bases). We have developed mechanisms for linking patients registered independently in different institutions and for linking physicians' master files to the state physician identifying databases. The network can also be used to enter clinical orders and visit notes from any device on the network and to store them in the appropriate RMRS medical record file system.