eHealth 2006 High Level Conference, Malaga (Spain),May 2006 1 The RTS project: Promoting secure and effective clinical telematic communication within the Aveiro region João Paulo Silva Cunha 1,2 , Isabel Cruz 2 , Ilídio Oliveira 1,2 , António Sousa Pereira 1,2 , César Telmo Costa 3 , Ana Margarida Oliveira 4 e Amândio Pereira 5 Introduction Several studies have been showing that paper-based clinical communication is error prone and many times is too slow for providing correct healthcare to citizens [1,2]. This issue is being solved by IT solutions inside healthcare institutions since the 1980’s. Electronic access to clinical information within hospitals is becoming a generalized reality in Europe through numerous enterprise-wide Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems from different vendors or developed in-house [3]. A lot of effort has been devoted to the deployment of such systems during the 1990’s but little effort was invested in systems for clinical electronic communication between different medical institutions. This situation has been a major discussion and study topic within the Healthcare Information Systems group at the University of Aveiro (www.ieeta.pt/sias ) and has raised several questions, such as: If we improve the intra-hospital clinical communication are we really improving the overall healthcare to citizens? Or, expressing this metaphorically: If we improve the technical conditions inside the “houses” of our “village”, do we improve the overall “village” as a community? This metaphor was the starting point, in the beginning of 2001, to concepts that were later incorporated in the “Rede Telemática da Saúde” (RTS) project. The literature had (and still has) lack of reports of systems to address these problems. Nevertheless, there are some examples in different countries that we have studied and learnt from, to establish the framework for our project. The longest experience in this area has been held in Denmark. The Medcom National Health Care Network was established between 1994 and 1999, after several pilot projects that started in the region of Funnen. In that year of 1999, Medcom became a permanent organization joining the Danish government, local authorities and IT companies [4]. This network uses a simple mailbox technique based on standard messages using UN/EDIFACT (United Nations /Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Trade) standards. By messaging each other, multiple systems from different vendors can exchange clinical information, from discharge letters to prescriptions and lab results. At the present time, more than 3 million messages are exchanged and some of the tokens are near the 100% coverage [5]. In Australia, the Health Connect initiative [6], launched in 1999, has deployed a pilot service in 2002 in Tasmania and the metropolitan area of Adelaide. After recent reformulation it was deployed last November the “Electronic Notification of Hospital Events” that is able to inform General Practitioners of hospital admission and discharge occurrences of their patients. 1 Dep. of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, University of Aveiro 2 IEETA- Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro 3 Hospital Infante D. Pedro, E.P.E. 4 Sub-Região de Saúde de Aveiro 5 Hospital Distrital de Águeda