Provides access to regional personal electronic health records system

Germany’s Rhine-Neckar metropolitan area, with the three states of Baden Wuerttemberg, Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate, are testing an open source patient portal that provides access to a ‘personal’ Electronic Health Record (p-EHR) system.

The patient portal is the front end for the patients personal cross-institutional electronic health record. In this electronic record the patient decides, which information is stored and which is not; the patient is in charge of the data in the record. The p-EHR is not to be confused with an EHR, which is the doctors electronic health record system.

The portal is not yet used for real, but a pilot with real patients is being prepared, according to Nilay Yüksekogul, one of the researchers involved in the development. “A first group of 25 study patients from Heidelberg affected with colorectal cancer will participate in the pilot”, she said.

The portal is developed by the Center of Information Technology and Medical Engineering of the University Hospital of Heidelberg. The research project is the heart of the Health region of the future Infopat (information technology for patient-oriented healthcare) which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Medical researcher Yüksekogul talked about the patient portal of the Infopat project at the Medetel conference that took place in Luxembourg on 24 April.

Access privileges

The solution combines the Liferay open source portal software with the open source eHealth integration platform IPF - an extension of the Apache Camel enterprise integration engine.

She explained that the main difference between Infopat and other EHR systems is that Infopat allows access control by the patient. The portal lets patients set access privileges, control the content and review access by medical professionals.

As part of their study, the Heidelberg university researchers compared the use of Liferay to a alternative, open source solution IndivoX. They prefer Liferay’s modularity and usability. They warn that Liferay is not a pure open source software - the vendor also sells licences for its enterprise edition, and the researchers note that updates are not immediately available. They also note that it takes time to learn how to use both Liferay and IPF. “Liferay provides a better fit to our requirements than IndivoX”, said Yüksekogul. “The are a few criteria that IndivoX does not meet.”

Liferay and IPF are easily combined, she added, and the researchers appreciate the very active IPF community.

More information:

Infopat

Presentation on Infopat at Medetel (pdf)