Project description
The objectives of the project are:
- Provide a customer document service for patient information systems
- Develop a model for B2C health information
- Provide easy-to-use concepts for performing health measurements at home
The architecture for integrating the document service with health information systems is shown in Fig 1.
The document flow between health care service provider and customer is controlled by the document server which provides both browser and client software based access for the customer. The document server is connected to the message server via the PIR Mailer agent and the SOAP interface defined by HL7 Finland.
The message server is an existing component providing B2B communication services for health care organisations. Utilising the same message server for B2C applications is attractive, since this approach ensures a single path for documents exchanged between the service provider and external parties. From the service provider point of view, the B2C document server appears as an additional communication peer.
The HTTPS protocol is used to secure all connections between entities. Additional security is provided by content encryption, which is used along the path between the customer and the PIR Mailer agent.
It is highly important, that structured information and machine-readable information is provided. To achieve this, HL7/CDA R2 type documents are used. The project will define a new generic document content, which is applied e.g. for providing feedback to the user and reporting laboratory results or home-made measurements.
One of our earlier observations has been that the customers want easy-to-use and seamless solutions for handling measurement information and forwarding it to the service provider. The current project will address this problem by providing direct connections from measurement devices to the secure communication channel, allowing semi-automatic transmission of measurement results to the service provider.
