Making data available through the internet security

Making data available through the Internet, security cannot be
compromised. Apart from the usual password protection, recent issues such
as denial of service need to be addressed.
Building the infrastructure for distributed medical data mining is an
important step in discovering new knowledge from medical records. It is
necessary to evaluate different middleware strategies, which integrate
clinical data from a variety of hospital-based data sources together with
patient-reported health information, and present the data via a secure web
interface [CoUmann, 2001]. A promising trend in middleware organization is
development of specialized Internet services that will take care not only of
availability of data but also of quality, security and privacy
3.2 Patient Record Standards
A patients' medical records are generally fragmented across multiple
treatment sites, posing an obstacle to clinical care, research, and public
health efforts. Electronic medical records and the Internet provide a
technical infrastructure on which to build longitudinal medical records that
can be integrated across care sites. Choices about the structure and
ownership of these records will have a profound impact on the accessibility
and privacy of patient information [Tang, 1999]. The technology promising
to unify the currently disparate pieces of a patient's medical record may

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actually threaten the accessibility of the information and compromise
patients' privacy. Integrated computerized medical record should have the
characteristics presented in Table 1 [Mandl, 2001].
Two main impediments stand in the way of these requirements. Firstly,
patients are becoming increasingly anxious about the privacy of their
medical records. Secondly, most healthcare institutions do not provide
effective access for patients to their own data and, despite technical
feasibility; they show little willingness to share data with their competitors
[Mandl, 2001]. Therefore, many current systems fragment medical records
by using incompatible means of acquiring, processing, storing, and
communicating data. These incompatibilities may result from a failure to
recognize the need for interoperability, or they may be deliberate, with the
aim of locking consumers into using a particular system. Either way, the
practice precludes sharing of data across different applications and
institutions.
Patient record systems should be designed so that they can exchange all
their stored data according to public standards and, at the same time, that
patients should have control over access and permissions. Building software
compliant with public standards will enable connectivity and interoperability
even of diverse systems. Patients' control will allow protection of privacy
according to individual preferences and help prevent some of the current
misuses of personal medical information. However, views on the shape of
standard records differ in emphasis: some anticipate records consisting of a
collection of web documents, whereas others emphasize the importance of
coded structured data that can be retrieved for aggregation, analysis, and
decision support.