Management of and Access to Virtual Electronic Health Records

Authors
Michael Springmann, Ludger Bischofs, Peter M. Fischer, Hans-Jörg Schek, Heiko Schuldt, Ulrike Steffens, Raimund Vogl
Type
In Proceedings
Date
2007/2
Appears in
Proceedings of the First International DELOS Conference
Location
Tirrenia-Pisa, Italy
Publisher
Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
Abstract
Digital Libraries (DLs) in eHealth are composed of electronic artefacts that are generated and owned by different healthcare providers. A major characteristic of eHealth DLs is that information is under the control of the organisation where data has been produced. The electronic health record (EHR) of patients therefore consists of a set of distributed artefacts and cannot be materialised for organisational reasons. Rather, the EHR is a virtual entity. The virtual integration of an EHR is done by encompassing services provided by specialised application systems into processes. This paper reports, from an application point of view, on national and European attempts to standardise electronic health EHR. From a technical perspective, the paper addresses how services can be made available in a distributed way, how distributed P2P infrastructures for the management of EHRs can be evaluated, and how novel content-based access can be provided for multimedia EHRs.