Web-based electronic patient records for collaborative medical applications

We developed a web-based system to interactively display electronic patient records (EPR), such as DICOM images, graphics, and structure reports and therapy records, for intranet and internet collaborative medical applications. This system has three major components, a C/S (client/server) architecture for EPR data acquisition and authoring, and a Web B/S architecture for data delivering. The Web viewer of this system integrates multi-media display modules and remote control module together to provide interactive EPR display and manipulation functions for collaborative applications. We have successfully used this system two times to provide teleconsultation for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) patients in Shanghai Infection Hospital and Xinhua Hospital. During the consultation, both the physicians in infection control area and the experts outside the control area could use this system interactively to manipulate and navigate the EPR objects of the SARS patients to facilitate a more precise diagnosis. This paper gives a new approach to create and manage image-based EPR from actual patient records, and also presents a novel method to use Web technology and DICOM standard to build an open architecture for collaborative medical applications. The system can be used for both intranet and internet medical applications such as tele-diagnosis, teleconsultation, and distant learning.