Development of a Remote Reference System to Medical Information of a Central Hospital for Smooth Relationship between Hospital and Clinic

Abstract

　We developed a medical information reference system in which a doctor in an outpatient clinic (hereafter clinic doctor) can refer to medical information generated in a core hospital of the area. A registered clinic doctor can refer to medical data concerning the only patient who was introduced to the hospital by the clinic doctor. We have already constructed a medical information database ‘EMIR; Essential Medical information Integrated Retrieval system.’ Requested data from a clinic doctor are taken from the EMIR and sent to a reference server which uses HL7 architecture. A clinic doctor can access the reference server via ISDN dial-up or on the Internet, and can refer to the patient’s data by common Web browser. To maintain the WWW’s original convenience and also to achieve security requirements, we used a single-sign on-tool which enables one-time password authentication without entering a password. We hope this system would contribute to smooth communication between a hospital and an outpatient clinic, and as well as to patient’s benefits.