Clinical-HINTS (Health Intelligence System) is a horizontally integrated decision support system (DSS) designed to meet the requirements for intelligent real-time clinical information management in critical care medical environments and to lay the foundation for the development of the next generation of intelligent medical instrumentation. The system presented was developed to refine and complement the information yielded by clinical laboratory investigations, thereby benefiting the management of the intensive care unit (ICU) patient. More specifically, Clinical-HINTS was developed to provide computer-based assistance with the acquisition, organisation and display, storage and retrieval, communication and generation of real-time patient-specific clinical information in an ICU. Clinical-HINTS is an object-oriented system developed in C+2 to run under Microsoft Windows as an embryo intelligent agent. Current generic reasoning skills include perception and reactive cognition of patient status but exclude therapeutic action. The system monitors the patient by communicating with the available sources of data and uses generic reasoning skills to generate intelligent alarms, or HINTS, on various levels of interpretation of an observed dysfunction, even in the presence of complex disorders. The system's communication and information management capabilities are used to acquire physiological data, and to store them along with their interpretations and any interventions for the dynamic recognition of interrelated pathophysiological states or clinical events.