To what extent can current Internet technology be leveraged to fulfill the vision of the electronic
patient record (EPR) as a multimedia object and the healthcare information system as a secure
distributed computing network? We explore provision of reliable, secure, intuitive, and
inexpensive medical Intranets through simple scripting and configuration – avoiding the need for
large programming teams. By prototyping the EPR as a secure newsgroup we demonstrate the
feasibility of a basic workflow system that: preserves a signed-paper style visibility of patient
data at all times; enriches presentation with multimedia online image exam viewing and user
controlled animation; whilst protecting confidential patient data via encrypted data
transmission, digital signatures, and authenticated user-access control. In the process several
limitation of this technology are uncovered.
