Abstract
Currently many healthcare systems process electronic patient referrals in Thailand. However, these systems suffer from two main obstacles. First, they can only process referrals from hospitals that use the same system. Consequently, medical staffs use such traditional methods as faxes or postal mail to transfer patient data. The second obstacle is the identification of patients when they cannot provide personal information by themselves. These obstacles hamper medical diagnoses. To cope with these obstacles, this paper proposes an electronic patient referral system with data exchange and fingerprint patient identification. From the initial phase of this research, we designed a cloud-based healthcare platform that provides such services as data exchange that allows the system to search for patient data using citizen IDs. In addition, this paper proposes an extended platform service: fingerprint identification. This service responds to citizen IDs from existing citizen fingerprint databases obtained during Thailand's citizen registration process. By combining these two functions, we support medical staffs who are expected to operate the referral process faster and more conveniently and improve the quality of care for patients.
