The mobile multimedia-based medical information system M3IS

Background

In today's world, hospitals and the majority of medical practices obtain and process clinical data electronically. In view of the fact that a patient is not only treated by a single physician or in a single institution, an exchange of electronic patient and treatment information is necessary. It is a general and above all vital requirement within the health care domain that clinical data always has to be existent where it is needed. An important step towards this objective is the creation of electronic networks between participating institutions, in order to enable the exchange of relevant clinical information.

Project information

The creation of electronic networks between all participants and the exchange of relevant clinical information forms the center of the M3IS project. In detail, an integrated system for the exchange of multimedia-based medical information within the scope of the medical treatment of a patient is being developed. The central aspect of the project is a document/communication server which acts as a mediator between the different information systems in all participating institutions. In detail, medical documents can (manually or automatically) be archived on the server and they can - with the necessary help of common web browsers - be retrieved from the server from all access points within all participating institutions. As a consequence, the workflow of a patient's treatment is thoroughly optimized.

In detail, all systems which are being developed are tested in the scope of the three common scenarios:

• Data exchange between diferrent departments of an institution: radiological, cardiological and other departments in a hospital are frequently equipped with specialized systems, which are, however, often missing interfaces for communicating with other department's systems. The M3IS project tries to solve this problem by providing appropriate interfaces for the exchange of clinical information between all participating department's systems.
• Ward round using a mobile device: ward rounds play an important role for the communication among hospital physicians and patients. Before the event itself can take place, all relevant information is tediously collected in order to be carried around in a little trolley. Specific information, as e. g. movies of catheterization examinations, cannot be accessed in a sickroom. In order to solve this problem, an efficient WLAN network infrastructure is being installed in the M3IS project, which can be used to download relevant informationen from the document server with the necessary help of a mobile device (tablet PC) and a web client.
• Data exchange between hospital and medical practices: After the discharge of a patient from a hospital, a different physician is responsible for his further treatment. In this context, the forwarding of medical reports and other relevant documents to doctors in private practices is often problematic: X-ray photographs which have been acquired in a hospital are, for example, very often hard to obtain. In order to avoid this problem, a communication interface is created in the M3IS project, through which a referring physician can retrieve information about his patient's treatment while the patient is still in hospital.

In the scope of the M3IS project, I was responsible for the development of a web-based system for retrieving and displaying a patient's laboratory information. Analogous to the software that was implemented in the intensive care unit software project, this web-based system offers 3 views on the laboratory information (examination, cumulative and trend view). The following link provides a screenshot of the the web-based laboratory information viewer.

Related websites

Website of the OFFIS computer science institute.
http://www.offis.de/

The M3IS project's homepage.
http://www.m3is.de/