CARDIOMEDIA: a communicable multimedia medical record on Intranet and digital optical memory card

As part of French health reform, French physicians were computerised by the end of 1998. A specific Intranet network will be used to communicate medical data between the health professionals. The objectives of the CARDIOMEDIA project were to develop and evaluate the feasibility of a coronary multimedia data record stored on an optical card and communicable on Intranet within the hospital. Patients treated by angioplasty at the University Hospital of Rennes participated in the experiment. In general, patients are treated in the University Hospital and are followed up by another health care provider closer to their home. The patient leaves the University Hospital with his card, which is directly available elsewhere for emergency or for consultation. This approach is assumed to reduce the number of examinations and to offer a better patient follow-up. The CARDIOMEDIA card is a specialised record including various data types: text, images, image sequences of coronarography and ECG signals. For this purpose an optical card with its large memory is very convenient. We used the DICOM format for image exchange and management. It is combined with CARDIOMEDIA specific compressing software. For the multimedia record the HTML format and web Intranet method are chosen. This provides an intuitive interface which can combine various data types and helper applications like a DICOM image viewer.