Title:	GP E-CONNECT: EXTENDS E-REFERRALS EXCHANGE TO HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS' COLLABORATIONS
Author(s):	Xuebing Yang , Yuan Miao , Yanchun Zhang
ISBN:	978-972-8924-81-2
Editors:	Mário Macedo
Year:	2009
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	e-Health, e-Referral exchange, Healthcare information integration
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	147
Last Page:	154
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	Having relevant, up-to-date information about a patient’s health care history is often crucial for providing the appropriate treatment. Most patient information is stored in isolated systems such as in a general practitioner’s local clinical system. To share this information with hospitals, specialists, or other healthcare providers, General Practitioners normally refer their patients by sending referral letters. Some general practitioners are still using paper based referrals which inevitably face issues such as referrals’ going missing, leaking of patient’s privacy, and low efficiency. Some others use electronic methods, e.g., attaching a letter to an email, which are easily ignored or missed, hard to track, difficult to automatically re-use, and not secure. In this paper, we describe a system named GP e-Connect which provides a novel solution for the instant and secure exchange of electronic referrals which also promotes the collaboration between healthcare providers. In the solution, e-referral is no longer just a letter, it becomes a part of the collaboration activities of a patient’s treatment. When an e-referral is created and sent, it starts a new collaboration on an episode of care. Secure messages can be exchanged easily between the collaborators and all the actions taken are recorded. A software agent is used to work with the clinic software to automate data retrieval from and recording data into the clinic software.
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