Security and Privacy in a DACS

The management of electronic health records (EHR), in general, and clinical documents, in particular, is becoming a key issue in the daily work of Healthcare Organizations (HO). The need for providing secure and private access to, and storage for, clinical documents together with the need for HO to interoperate, raises a number of issues difficult to solve. Many systems are in place to manage EHR and documents. Some of these Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) follow standards in their document structure and communications protocols, but many do not. In fact, they are mostly proprietary and do not interoperate. Our proposal to solve the current situation is the use of a DACS (Document Archiving and Communication System) for providing security, privacy and standardized access to clinical documents.