Impact of Internet on Cytology Information Management Ljerka LUI a,1 and Livia MOLNAR a a Karlovac University of Applied Sciences, Croatia Abstract. Internet technologies and services impose global information standards in the sphere of healthcare as a whole, which are then implied and applied in the domain of cytology laboratories. Web-based operations form a significant operating segment of any contemporary cytology laboratory as they enable operations by the use of technology, which is usually free of the restrictions imposed by the traditional way of business (geographic area and narrow localisation of activities). In their operations, almost all healthcare organisations currently create and use electronic data anddocuments , which can originate both inside and outside the organisation. An enormous amount of information thus used and exchanged may be processed timely and in a high-quality way only by integrated information systems, given three basic safety requirements: data confidentiality, integrity and availability. In the Republic of Croatia, integration of private and public healthcare information systems has been ongoing for several years but the private healthcare does not yet operate as an integrated system. Instead, each office operates using its own separate information system, i.e. database. This paper elaborates the argument that the sample private cytology laboratory possesses an IT system that meets current market and stakeholder needs of the healthcare sector in Croatia, given that private doctors’ offices/polyclinics use IT technologies in their operations but make only partial use of Internet capacities in the segment of communication with their business associates and patients, implying the need to continue the research on a statistically relevant sample of EU countries. Keywords: Internet, Cytology Laboratory, Management Information Systems 1. Introduction The Internet currently stands for a global multimedia distributed information system encompassing almost the entire world and enabling not only access to spatially distributed multimedia content, but also generation of specific business/medical content tailored to specific user queries in an interactive operating regime, such as requests by patients and/or doctors’ offices/polyclinics for cytology test results. Accordingly, this paper aims to present the impact of Internet technologies on the management of business and health information in a cytology laboratory, given the increasing importance of Internet worldwide, to which Croatia is no exception. This paper intends to clarify the functioning of the IT system of a private cytology laboratory in Croatia observed in terms of studying the impacts of informatization, and how well the observed laboratory has adapted to using the Internet to meet its stakeholders’ needs. The paper focuses on exploring the implications of the Internet on the implementation of an integrated IT system in private healthcare institutions in Croatia, as seen in the practice of medical laboratories, on the example of the three currently 1 Corresponding Author: Ljerka Luic, Karlovac University of Applied Sciences, Trg J.J. Strossmayera 9, 47000 Karlovac, Croatia. Email: ljerka.luic@vuka.hr Health Informatics Meets eHealth G. Schreier et al. (Eds.) © 2016 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-645-3-119 119