The Tyrolean Health Information Network

Das Gesundheitsinformationsnetz Tirol

Keywords

Medicine, Public Health, Diseases, Prevention, Medical Examinations, Hospitals, Citizens, Patients, Physicians, Social Sponsoring, Medical Informatics, Tyrolean Health Information Network

Overview

One of the primary goals of medical informatics is to develop really useful tools that support patients, physicians, nurses or other health care professionalists by making use of the existing methods and techniques of information technology, telecommunication, management and organization theory. At the time we are starting a project that is going to provide the Tyrolean citizens with an information network about the health system, its institutions and organizations. In the following paper we present the aim of this project - the goals, the benefits and our strategy to establish the system and getting it widely used.

• What is the Tyrolean Health Information Network?
• Who shall benefit from the Tyrolean Health Information Network?
• How to access the Tyrolean Health Information Network
• Realization of the Tyrolean Health Information Network

What is the Tyrolean Health Information Network?

The Tyrolean Health Information Network is a comprehensive, well organized collection of diverse informations about the Tyrolean healthsystem, its institutions and organizations. It features informations

• about risks, prevention, early detection and post therapeutical care of common diseases
• about special medical examinations
• about how to efficiently access and responsibly use health services and social services
• about the rights and the responsibilities of patients and other health customers

The Tyrolean Health Information Networks makes use of the Internet, particulary the WWW, since this serves as an readily available technique. This allows to continually update all information. By using multimedia even complex medical facts can be explained in a way, every user can understand. On contrary to other interactive techniques like the Teletext-services, WWW also allows to print the information. This is extremely important for establishing the system.

The Tyrolean Health Information Networks will also establish a regional news group that supports the multilateral information exchange between citizens and health care providers.

Who shall benefit from the Tyrolean Health Information Network?

Primarily patients, their relatives and other health customers shall benefit from it. The Tyrolean Health Information Network shall help

• to prevent from uncertainity and stress, that comes from unsufficient information about medical examinations and/or therapies. It serves as an additional up-to-date written source of information that completes and reminds to the physicians explanations.

• to save time when searching for informations, since it reduces the necessity of making several phone calls, making hand written notices and getting complicated explantations

• to get access to informations or official forms right at the time when it is needed, since it is not limited to any kind of office hours.

• to access the experiences and the knowledge of other citizens by utilizing the news group

• It helps saving the time of clinical personel. For example the number of phone calls of citizens who need to get instructions how to get to the hospital is assumed to be reduced.

• Health care providers, medical and social consultation centres can save both time and money on the long run. This may happen, if the Tyrolean Health Information Network becomes well established. In this case these organizations may stop or reduce the production and distribution of information sheets.

• Administrative organizations can provide the citizens with up-to-date information inexpensively. There are lots of institutions and organisations that are doing good work but are not recognized by the citizens yet.

• Physicians will have better opportunities for further training and information gathering, since they will be provided with a personal internet account free of charge. Additionally their multilateral communication might be supported by a physician-news-group with limited access.

How to access the Tyrolean Health Information Network

As a patient or health customer there are several possibilities:

• Physicians will get an internet access free of charge. Therefore they may use the Tyrolean Health Information Network as a marketing tool and offer an access to their patients too.Therefore they respectively their staff can offer prints of the required pages. They also will help patients to search for information in the Tyrolean Health Information Network.

• Other Institutions like pharmacies, hospitals and even banks may develop the Tyrolean Health Information Network as a marketing tool too. They can increase their customer frequency.

• Hospitals will probably provide access to their patients. Especially hospitals consider the Tyrolean Health Information Network as a medium to inform patients about their health services.

• Finally private internet accounts might be used. Since the costs for occasional users are moderate now, we expect that PC-owners will be encouraged to apply for an internet account. We will support this trend by encouraging people to found "user communities", who share one internet access, which may be located at the home of a friend or relative.

Realization of the Tyrolean Health Information Network

The realization of the Tyrolean Health Information Network will be dominated by rather collecting and structuring existing material than by working out new information resources. This enables us to build up our information network very fast and to break up our project into small working packages that can be done by students. Additionally the existing material is assumed to be closely related to the present demands of the citizens.

However, we have to investigate the citizens demands in a more sophisticated way and we have to invest into the physicians internet accounts, into the production and care of HTML-Pages and into Public Relations. Therefore we have worked out encouraging offerings to potential sponsors.

The first pages will already be produced when the Third International WWW-conference in Darmstadt takes place. We expect to go on the net in the fourth quarter of 1995. However, a demonstration with full sponsor information will be available on the internet soon (see URL: http://info.uibk.ac.at/1/c/c5/c506/gin_bau.html)