An Albanian open source telemedicine platform.

INTRODUCTION: The use of open source technologies to create collaboration platforms can produce huge advantages with small investment. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We set up a telemedicine network for a healthcare district with typical centralization issues of developing countries. Our network was built using broadband Internet connection, and the digital divide in rural areas was reduced by means of wireless Internet connection. A software infrastructure was deployed on the network to implement the collaboration platform among different healthcare facilities. RESULTS: We obtained an integrated platform with modest investment in hardware and operating systems and no costs for application software. Messaging, content management, information sharing, and videoconferencing are among the available services of the infrastructure. Furthermore, open source software is managed and continuously updated by active communities, making it possible to obtain systems similar to commercial ones in terms of quality and reliability. CONCLUSIONS: As the use of free software in public administration is being widely promoted across the European Union, our experience may provide an example to implement similar infrastructures in the field of healthcare and welfare.

Electronic Health Record in Italy and Personal Data Protection.

The present article deals with the Italian Electronic Health Record (hereinafter EHR), recently introduced by Act 221/2012, with a specific focus on personal data protection. Privacy issues--e.g., informed consent, data processing, patients' rights and minors' will--are discussed within the framework of recent e-Health legislation, national Data Protection Code, the related Data Protection Authority pronouncements and EU law. The paper is aimed at discussing the problems arising from a complex, fragmentary and sometimes uncertain legal framework on e-Health.

A cloud based architecture to support Electronic Health Record.

We introduce a novel framework of electronic healthcare enabled by a Cloud platform able to host both Hospital Information Systems (HIS) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems and implement an innovative model of Electronic Health Record (EHR) that is not only patient-oriented but also supports a better governance of the whole healthcare system. The proposed EHR model adopts the state of the art of the Cloud technologies, being able to join the different clinical data of the patient stored within the HISs and EMRs either placed into a local Data Center or hosted into a Cloud Platform enabling new directions of data analysis.