Design and implementation of a web-enabled haematological system

This paper describes the design and the implementation of a web-enabled integrated haematological system, named e-HS. The proposed system runs on a set of distributed network nodes providing useful haematological services. These services include patient-oriented data management, digitized histopathological slides (DHS) acquisition, teleconsulting facilities, etc. The objective of e-HS is to supply web-enabled services according to haematological requirements, implement a distributed storage scheme for DHS, and provide a common database containing all haematological laboratory results by using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and web technologies. Our implementation can be accessible to every authorized physician at the distributed nodes without any additional software. The only software required for the user is the widely used browser (e.g. MS Internet Explorer v 3.02 or higher). Besides, by using a self-explaining user interfaces and HTML-techniques, such as hyperlinks, the necessary amount of training at the physicians-side is reduced to a minimum. A first implementation of the e-HS, has been established at the Medical Physics Department of the University of Patras (master node of the system), and has been tested with success by the medical staff of the Hospital Departments of the University of Patras and Thessalonica that served as distributed nodes of the system.