CARDIOMEDIA: a communicable multimedia medical record on Intranet and digital optical memory card

As part of French health reform, French physicians were computerised by the end of 1998. A specific Intranet network will be used to communicate medic al data between the health professionals. The objectives of the CARDIOMEDIA project were to develop and evaluate the feasibility of a coronary multime dia data record stored on an optical card and communicable on Intranet with in the hospital. Patients treated by angioplasty at the University Hospital of Rennes participated in the experiment. In general, patients are treated in the University Hospital and are followed up by another health care prov ider closer to their home. The patient leaves the University Hospital with his card, which is directly available elsewhere for emergency or for consul tation. This approach is assumed to reduce the number of examinations and t o offer a better patient follow-up. The CARDIOMEDIA card is a specialised r ecord including various data types: text, images, image sequences of corona rography and ECG signals. For this purpose an optical card with its large m emory is very convenient. We used the DICOM format for image exchange and m anagement. It is combined with CARDIOMEDIA specific compressing software. F or the multimedia record the HTML format and web Intranet method are chosen . This provides an intuitive interface which can combine various data types and helper applications like a DICOM image viewer. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scien ce Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.