Recently developed software which enables patients to contact the public health service over the Internet is being made available freely

The software enables communication between the Internet and the health network, which is a closed computer network for health professionals, in a way which takes proper care of security. Patients want the opportunity to contact the public health service over the Internet. A survey conducted by the NST in 2002 showed that a full 48 per cent of respondents wanted e-mail contact with their regular GP.

The software which has been developed is intended for commercial and public sector suppliers which want to develop patient-centred Internet services. The project manager at the NST, Per Egil Kummervold, says that individual suppliers will probably launch services based on this software as early as the end of this year.

The usual e-mail and Web functions do not satisfy the strict security requirements for storing and sending health information. One of the main challenges in fulfilling these strict requirements is that the process can easily result in considerable expense for both the public health service and patients. On the basis of the program code from NST, suppliers can now create services for the health network which fulfil the requirements of Norway's Personal Data Act (Personvernloven), without incurring excessive costs.

"We expect this to speed up the development of patient-centred services on the Internet," says Per Egil Kummervold. A wide range of Internet services may be relevant in the future, from direct access to X-ray images and test results from hospitals as well as direct communication with specialists, to services where patients send their own photographs of injuries or rashes for health professionals to analyse. The main reason that patients cannot do this today is that the security issues have been too complex to enable communication between the Internet and the secured health network.

Untraditional licensing

The software is available as open source code. This means that the suppliers can freely access the program code and can develop their own software on the basis of the code. This is a new way to develop IT services for the public health service. Traditionally, only one supplier has had access to the program code. The use of open source code makes it unnecessary for each supplier to develop its own solutions in parallel with others. This reduces costs, which in turn benefits patients.

More information: www.telemed.no/pasientlink

Per Egil Kummervold, Project Manager, mobile telephone +47 414 35 795

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