Development of a network model for the total health care management on multi-vendor environment

Computer networking and multimedia communication are state-of-the-art techniques. Development of the high speed, high quality, and high security system is required in the medical field. In Japan, a remarkable progress has been made in computer networking while only several medical sites have been connected to the Internet. One of the most important problems of preventive medicine is total health care in the countries of aged population because the terms of constant stage of diseases are very long, and that stage of life needs high quality medical care. However, no country has yet succeeded to build ideal protocols and systems. The authors developed a distributed database management model for the total health care (health check results during pregnancy, annual health check results, hospital consultation record prescriptions) as a first trial in Japan, using multi-vender terminals, such as UNIX, MS-DOS, Macintosh and FAX terminals. Some of them have connection with Ethernet, Local Talk, Async High speed Serial Line Internet Protocol, and Point to Point connections, UUCP and usual telecommunication lines. In our model network system, the performance of existing data transfer protocols, such as electronic mail, Multimedia Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and Fax, was investigated for replying to queries. The means to establish security in practical use is also investigated.