Study of aspects in electronic patient journal relevant to the medical office agreement

Keeping track of the condition of a patient is and always will be important in order for a doctor to give the best diagnosis and keeping the patient as healthy as possible. Earlier the patient journals were stored at the local medical office, and were not possible to get your hands on if you were in another part of the country, or county for that matter. Electronic Patient Journal aims to change this for good. When, or if, the medical offices start using Electronic Patient Journal, viewing and getting the latest update on a journal will no longer be a problem for the doctors, making their job easier. In Norway today Electronic Patient Journals are coming more and more into use. This is a study on how to develop the system a little further. In some counties in Norway, a roster has been set up for medical treatment after office hours. They often need to access journals from the other medical offices participating in the roster. This is not possible today, but we have specified a solution that should make it possible. Electronic Patient Journal is a powerful tool for doctors, with it they can access journals from their work desks and the information inside the journals are categorized so it is easy to find the information that is needed. With the Electronic Patient Journal system it is possible to administrate the access to the journals down to the doctors using it or even down to a bed in a hospital. This way the system takes care of the professional secrecy. The doctors’ computer knowledge is in general good and they are ready to start using new technology. When developing systems for the health sector it is important that the doctors’ advices are taken to consideration. If they are not, the systems might be very good and very handy, but might not be used because the doctors think it is has many functions or that they do not understand the system at all. We will include explanations on what the different background material are and what they do, such as Public Key Infrastructure and how Electronic Patient Journal is built up. To maintain the security, Public Key Infrastructure is often used in relation to Electronic Patient Journal. We have explained why this is a highly used solution in upholding the security and why it is so popular. In our suggestion we have decided to use Virtual Private Network for transferring the journals securely. We have specified a solution that should make it possible too access journals after office time. This solution will help doctors make better diagnosis and give better health aid in general. We have not specified a total program just how to adapt a module into the existing systems. You must establish a register, ”Treatment register”, that can hold parts of the Electronic Patient Journal. This has to be done in conduction of the Norwegian Laws. This register will store information that is copied from the journals the doctors are writing on their own system. If the doctor means that some of the information he adds to a journal is important and should be stored for future notice, he checks off the information to be sent to the “Treatment register” and it is stored both in the local registry and in the “Treatment register”. To access the information in the “Treatment register”, you need permission to access the journals. This thesis is a theoretical study and no testing or product development will be done. The idea is that we will study how EPJ works, see if this is secure enough and then make a recommendation on how an enterprise can implement this