BACKGROUND: The Internet is becoming increasingly important as a way for patients to acquire medical information and as a means for patient-physician communication. Questions about appropriate use of this new technology have been brought to the fore by the many patients using the Internet to seek sildenafil prescriptions. OBJECTIVE: To present the first description of a physician designed and directed Internet-based prescribing system of sildenafil, together with data covering more than...

BACKGROUND: The Wireless Application Protocol technology implemented in newer mobile phones has built-in facilities for handling much of the information processing needed in clinical work. OBJECTIVES: To test a practical approach we ported a relational database of the Danish pharmaceutical catalogue to Wireless Application Protocol using open source freeware at all steps. METHODS: We used Apache 1.3 web software on a Linux server. Data containing the Danish pharmaceutical catalogue were...

BACKGROUND: In 1998, the U.K. National Health Service Information for Health Strategy proposed the implementation of a National electronic Library for Health to provide clinicians, healthcare managers and planners, patients and the public with easy, round the clock access to high quality, up-to-date electronic information on health and healthcare. The Virtual Branch Libraries are among the most important components of the National electronic Library for Health . They aim at creating online...

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...

BACKGROUND: The ease by which the Internet is able to distribute information to geographically-distant users on a wide variety of computers makes it an obvious candidate for a technological solution for electronic patient record systems. Indeed, second-generation Internet technologies such as the ones described in this article - XML (eXtensible Markup Language), XSL (eXtensible Style Language), DOM (Document Object Model), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), JavaScript, and JavaBeans - may...

BACKGROUND: Clinical information systems frequently use intranet and Internet technologies. However these technologies have emphasized sharing and not security, despite the sensitive and private nature of much health information. Digital certificates (electronic documents which recognize an entity or its attributes) can be used to control access in clinical intranet applications. OBJECTIVES: To outline the need for access control in distributed clinical database systems, to describe the use...

BACKGROUND: The Intranet is a rapidly evolving technology in large hospitals. In this paper, we describe the first phase of an Intranet project in a multi-hospital system in New York City. OBJECTIVES: (1) To encourage the use of the Intranet among physicians, nurses, managers, and other associates in a multi-hospital system; and (2) to build the Intranet in a cost-effective manner using existing resources. METHODS: A WebTrends Log Analyzer assessed the Intranet use in terms of the number of...