Emerging and Established Trends to Support Secure Health Information Exchange

This work aims to provide information, guidelines, established practices and standards, and an extensive evaluation on new and promising technologies for the implementation of a secure information sharing platform for health-related data. We focus strictly on the technical aspects and specifically on the sharing of health information, studying innovative techniques for secure information sharing within the health-care domain, and we describe our solution and evaluate the use of blockchain methodologically for integrating within our implementation. To do so, we analyze health information sharing within the concept of the PANACEA project that facilitates the design, implementation, and deployment of a relevant platform. The research presented in this paper provides evidence and argumentation toward advanced and novel implementation strategies for a state-of-the-art information sharing environment; a description of high-level requirements for the transfer of data between different health-care organizations or cross-border; technologies to support the secure interconnectivity and trust between information technology (IT) systems participating in a sharing-data “community”; standards, guidelines, and interoperability specifications for implementing a common understanding and integration in the sharing of clinical information; and the use of cloud computing and prospectively more advanced technologies such as blockchain. The technologies described and the possible implementation approaches are presented in the design of an innovative secure information sharing platform in the health-care domain

An architecture for regional health information networks addressing issues of modularity and interoperability, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2005, nr 4

A fundamental pre-requisite for the establishment of a scaleable regional health information network (RHIN) is the development of an architectural framework and tools for the integration of specialized autonomous systems and e-health service platforms supported by an underlying health information infrastructure (HII). In this context, HYGEIAnet, which is the RHIN of Crete in Greece, has identified and utilized a number of critical software components enabling integrated access to clinically significant information, based on an open architecture addressing successfully the various interoperability challenges at hand. HYGEIAnet provides the framework for the reuse of standardized common components and public interfaces, thus enabling integrated and personalized delivery of healthcare

ACGT: advancing clinico-genomic trials on cancer - four years of experience.

The challenges regarding seamless integration of distributed, heterogeneous and multilevel data arising in the context of contemporary, post-genomic clinical trials cannot be effectively addressed with current methodologies. An urgent need exists to access data in a uniform manner, to share information among different clinical and research centers, and to store data in secure repositories assuring the privacy of patients. Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials (ACGT) was a European Commission funded Integrated Project that aimed at providing tools and methods to enhance the efficiency of clinical trials in the -omics era. The project, now completed after four years of work, involved the development of both a set of methodological approaches as well as tools and services and its testing in the context of real-world clinico-genomic scenarios. This paper describes the main experiences using the ACGT platform and its tools within one such scenario and highlights the very promising results obtained

MSc Thesis

<div><div><div><p>Στην παρούσα εργασία περιγράφεται ένα πλήρως υλοποιημένο σύστημα αναζήτησης ενδιαφέροντων εγγράφων στον Παγκόσμιο Ιστό. Πρόκειται για μια “αράχνη” που δέχεται σαν είσοδο ένα έγγραφο πρότυπο και προσπαθεί να βρει παρόμοια με αυτό έγγραφα. Ξεκινώντας από κάποια αρχικά σημεία, ακολουθεί του συνδέσμους και περιηγείται στο Διαδίκτυο. Για κάθε νέο έγγραφο που ανακαλύπτεται, εξάγονται οι λέξεις κλειδιά του και συγκρίνεται με το έγγραφο πρότυπο. Η σύγκριση βάσει λέξεων κλειδιών γίνεται με τη χρησιμοποίηση της αναπαράστασης των εγγράφων στο χώρο διανυσμάτων (vector space), ενός αρκετά γνωστού μοντέλου στο χώρο του Information Retrieval .</p></div></div></div

An Infrastructure for Integrated Electronic Health Record Services: The Role of XML (Extensible Markup Language)

BACKGROUND: The sharing of information resources is generally accepted as the key to substantial improvements in productivity and better quality of care. In addition, due to the greater mobility of the population, national and international healthcare networks are increasingly used to facilitate the sharing of healthcare-related information among the various actors of the field. In the context of HYGEIAnet, the regional health telematics network of Crete, an Integrated Electronic Health Record environment has been developed to provide integrated access to online clinical information, accessible throughout the island. OBJECTIVES: To make available comprehensive medical information about a patient by means of incorporating all the distributed and heterogeneous health record segments into an Integrated Electronic Health Record that can be viewed on-line through a unified user interface and visualization environment. METHODS: The technological approach for implementing this Integrated Electronic Health Record environment is based on the HYGEIAnet Reference Architecture, which provides the necessary framework for the reuse of services, components, and interfaces. Seamless presentation of information is achieved by means of the Extensible Markup Language (XML), while its underlying capabilities allow for dynamic navigation according to personalized end-user preferences and authorities. RESULTS: The Integrated Electronic Health Record environment developed in HYGEIAnet provides the basis for consistent and authenticated access to primary information over the Internet in order to support decision-making. Primary information is always kept at the place where it has been produced, and is maintained by the most appropriate clinical information system, contrasting traditional store and forward techniques, or centralized clinical data repositories. CONCLUSIONS: Since documents are much more easily accessible rather than data inside a database, Extensible Markup Language has the potential of becoming a very cheap technology provided, of course, that the underlying Healthcare Information Infrastructure exists. XML can be introduced incrementally and its implementation is completely transparent to the end user