Electronic Health Records in a Tele-Ophthalmologic Application with Oracle 10g

Abstract

Electronic health record (EHR) refers to the complete set of information that resides in electronic form and is related to the past, present and future health status. EHR standardization is a key characteristic to exchange healthcare information. Health Level Seven (HL7) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) are intensively influencing this process. This chapter describes the development and experience of a web-based application, TeleOftalWeb 3.2, to store and exchange EHRs in ophthalmology. We apply HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and DICOM standards. The application has been built on Java Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) technologies. EHRs are stored in the database Oracle 10g. Its architecture is triple-layered. Physicians can view, modify and store all type of medical images. For security, all data transmissions were carried over encrypted Internet connections such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and HyperText Transfer Protocol over SSL (HTTPS). The application verifies the standards related to privacy and confidentiality. TeleOftalWeb 3.2 has been tested by from the University Institute of Applied Ophthalmobiology (IOBA), Spain. Nowadays, more than thousand health records have been introduced.