Professional communication for coordination of care: inter-mediation for a better management of patients

The communication of data through telecommunication networks between Healthcare professionals and particularly Hospitals and family doctors is a fundamental challenge for the next decade. Some experiences are demonstrating the feasibility of this approach and give clear insight of the potentials, difficulties and constraints of the problem. Different technical solutions are proposed following a centralised or a distributed architecture, security and confidentiality obligations, and the users requirements. We propose an original solutions based on the principle of inter-mediation to provide intelligent treatments and services on the messages that are exchanged between the network participants. This approach proved to be successful in the experimental field of Armentières (France) where more than 30,000 messages were exchanged between the hospital and the General Practitioners during 1999. Following this experimental phase, the prototype is currently customised and industrialised to fulfil the requirements and needs of an healthcare sector.