HYGEIAnet

HYGEIAnet was implemented during 01/01/1998-31/10/2001 under the INTERREG II program in the context of the project "Crete - A telematics center".

The project's main objective was to contribute to the development of Information Society at the Regional Level. It included R&D in three application domains, culture, health and public administration. By building on the results of previous research and development projects of ICS-FORTH, the main objective of the project was to develop the technological infrastructure of the region, to deploy at a large scale advance multi-sectorial telematics applications and services, to evaluate their cost/benefit and cost effectiveness, and to contribute to the preparation of the Region for entering into the Information age. Especially, regarding to the health domain, HYGEIAnet included a set of Medical Information Systems and a number of e-health services that developed, deployed and operated in all healthcare organizations of the Regional Healthcare System (ESY) of Crete.

A detailed presentation of the various products and services of HYGEIANnet which are considered as the predecessors of today’s software suite "Integrated Care Solutions - ICS" of the Center for eHealth Applications and Services can be found below:

eHealth Collaboration Environment

A collaboration environment allowing health professionals to remotely offer/receive consultation. Health professionals create episode folders and upload or create standardized content in them. They can share this content asynchronously, or "meet" in the episode and use chat and videoconference for real-time communication.

Description of Technology

There is also a number of medical devices integrated into the system: two cardiograph models, a vital signs monitor, a spirometer and an electronic stethoscope. These devices can be used to upload medical content in the episode (e.g. record and upload a .scp ECG file), or communicate the content in real-time mode to another participant.

Apart from medical device data acquired from devices, there are forms describing examinations, second opinion request, request for more data, conclusion, etc. These forms provide a means for standardized communication between professionals, for many scenarios. The system has a modular architecture and can be readily extended to support more medical devices and data exchange forms, in the future. The application is integrated with the electronic health record application, which allows to access information from the medical history and prior examinations such as laboratory results, old ECGs and xRays. The system supports smart cards, for user authentication (login) and digital signing of the uploaded content.

Typical Screens of the Graphical User Interface:

Relevant Demo: (wmv file / 975Kb)

Installation: Kyklades Islands: Thera, Therasia, Sikinos, Folegandros, Anafi.

ICS Appointments

ICS Appointments was designed to meet the unique challenges of both inpatient and outpatient scheduling. ICS Appointments can manage complex appointment scheduling activities in an intuitive appointment visual web interface. As an enterprise scheduling and access management tool, ICS Appointments allows you to improve organizational efficiency while maximizing revenue

Description of Technology

ICS Appointments will find resource appointments automatically or you can book them yourself using the color coded scheduling grid. A few mouse clicks let you do anything from transferring appointments to another date/time and resource to scheduling a customized series of recurring appointments.ICS Appointments has built in reports to help you manage every aspect of your practice.

Resource reports allow you to easily print each providers schedule for the day or the week. Appointment History let you quickly provide your patients with a complete list of all their past and upcoming appointments. Statistical reports allow you to accurately monitor vital information such as cancellations, no-shows and more.

Typical Screens of the Graphical User Interface:

Relevant Demo: (wmv file / 1.73Mb)

Installation: General Regional Hospital "Venizelio - Pananio", Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

Health Information Infrastructure

COAS - Clinical Observations Access Service
ΠImplements standardized, public interfaces to any clinical information system, where the complete, original (acquired or physician generated), clinical information is kept.

HRS - Health Resource Service
Used for the identification of available resources (i.e. users, applications, software components) within a regional health information network, together with all related access methods.Examples of resources include pharmacies on-duty, hospitals and clinics, clinical information systems available at a regional level, methods and technologies available for accessing primary information, and protocols for exchanging information with them.

PIDS - Patient Identification Service
Allows for the unique association of distributed patient record segments to a master patient index, and dynamically propagates any information modification to all subscribed parties. It is used for identifying patients based on their demographic data and for the correlation of their IDs across different ID domains.

I-EHR IS - Integrated Electronic Health Record Indexing System
Enables the linking of distributed EHR segments through a hierarchical indexing model.

TS - Terminology Service
Manages (and distributes) coded data through a central point of reference, so that data analysis is facilitated within a health information network. It can be used for the association of existing coding schemes, and to enable the transformation of information from one form or representation to another.

Pre-hospital Health Emergency Management System

The pilot system currently used by EKAB Crete consists of a number of applications providing services to the staff of EKAB and other cooperating healthcare service providers.

Description of Technology

The pilot system currently used by EKAB Crete consists of a number of applications providing services to the staff of EKAB and other cooperating healthcare service providers. In detail, there are the following applications: The application for the operators and dispatchers at the Health Emergency Coordination Center (HECC) of EKAB allows creating, completing and printing the electronic "Incident Card". Based on specific algorithms (online triage protocol), it offers help with regard to incident severity estimation and the selection of the most appropriate resources (e.g. ambulance car or mobile unit). The doctors' application at the HECC of EKAB, in cooperation with the specific subsystems in the mobile units or at a Primary Care Center (PCC), provides the possibility of patient telemonitoring, based on the vital signs and ECGs being transmitted through telematics from the incident site. Furthermore, by using the "Clinical Evaluation Card", the doctor at the HECC has a means to record in detail and in a well-structured manner the patient condition together with the therapeutic actions taken, during the whole incident. The application for the mobile unit crews takes care, almost automatically, for the acquisition and transmission of the patient's vital signs etc., from the mobile unit to the HECC of EKAB.

Typical Screens of the Graphical User Interface:

Relevant Demo: (wmv file / 1.86Mb)

Installation: Health Emergency Coordination Center of EKAB Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

Integrated Care Solutions

Based on an extensible application framework for the development of clinical information systems, ICS provides in a convenient and user-friendly manner the functionality required by doctors, nurses and administrative hospital staff during the various processes and tasks in a hospital , such as inpatient / outpatient management, order processing, reporting, management of nursing activities and health record maintenance. An integrated Coding Schemes Explorer, role-based access control (RBAC), integrated cost registration and billing support belong to the basic characteristics of the system, which is also fully integrated with the standards-based Health Information Infrastructure.

Description of Technology

Primarily, the system follows a patient-centered approach, while also supporting department-centered and other views wherever required. The intuitive user interface is based on a workbench with different views, including Floor Plan View and Explorer View, which allow access in a context-sensitive manner to the data and operations supported by the system.

ICS, which provides single sign-in with optional SmartCard authentication, relies on the relevant standards for security, message exchange (e.g. HL7, DICOM), information encoding (ICD, SNOP, ATC, etc.) and electronic collaboration (e.g. PIDS, CORBA, COAS). Multi-linguality is enabled through appropriate GUI implementation and database design.

Typical Screens of the Graphical User Interface:

Relevant Demo: (wmv file/ 1,64Mb)

Installation: General Regional Hospital "Venizelio - Pananio", Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

Integrated Electronic Health Record

An IT Service for professionals or citizens who need a uniform way to access parts of patient record data that are physically located in different clinical information systems. Provides fast, secure and authorized access to distributed patient record information from multiple disparate sources.

Typical Screens of the Graphical User Interface:

Relevant Demo: (wmv file / 3.79Mb)

Installation: South and Eastern Belfast Health and Social Services Trust in the UK.

Primary Health Care Center Information System

The Primary Health Care Center Information System (PHCCIS) implements a generic and broad-spectrum patient record to be used by General Practitioners. The principle functionality of the system is the electronic storage and management of patient data that are produced during the communication about the patient betwee

Description of Technology

The Primary Health Care Center Information System (PHCCIS) implements a generic and broad-spectrum patient record to be used by General Practitioners.
The principle functionality of the system is the electronic storage and management of patient data that are produced during the communication about the patient between two or more (health care) individuals.