Management of and Access to Virtual Electronic Health Records

Digital Libraries (DLs) in eHealth are composed of electronic artefacts that are generated and owned by different healthcare providers. A major characteristic of eHealth DLs is that information is under the control of the organization where data has been produced. The electronic health record of patients therefore consists of a set of distributed artefacts and cannot be materialized for organizational reasons. Rather, the electronic patient record is a virtual entity. The virtual integration of an electronic patient record is done by encompassing services provided by specialized application systems into processes. This paper reports, from an application point of view, on national and European attempts to standardize electronic health records. From a technical perspective, the paper addresses how services can be made available in a distributed way, how distributed P2P infrastructures can be evaluated, and how novel content-based access can be provided for multimedia electronic health records.