Content access and distribution of multimedia medical data in E-health

E-health is greatly impacting on information distribution and availability within the health services, hospitals and to the public. Previous research has addressed the development of system architectures with the aim of integrating the distributed and heterogeneous medical information systems. Easing the difficulties in the sharing and management of multimedia medical data and the timely accessibility to these data are critical needs for health care providers. We have proposed a client-server agent that integrates and allows a portal to every permitted information system of the hospital that consists of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), radiology information system (RIS) and hospital information system (HIS) via the intranet and the Internet. Our proposed agent enables remote access into the usually closed information system of the hospital and a server that manages all the multimedia medical data and allows for in-depth and complex search queries for content access and automatic creation of patient reports for distribution.