Technical and architectural issues in deploying electronic health records (EHRs) over the WWW

In this paper technical and architectural issues are described in deploying electronic health records (EHRs) over the WWW. The project described involved deployment of EHRs that have been designed to serve in the education of health professionals and health/biomedical informaticians. In order to allow for ubiquitous access to a range of EHRs remotely an architecture was designed with three layers: (a) the "Internet" or remote user access layer (2) the "Perimeter Network", or middle firewall security and authentication layer (3) the "HINF EHR Network", consisting of the internal servers hosting EHR applications and databases. The approaches allow for a large number of remote users running a range of operating systems to access the educational EHRs from any location remotely. Virtual machine (VM) technology is employed to allow multiple versions and platforms of operating systems to be installed side-by-side on a single server. Security, technical and budgetary considerations are described as well as past and current applications of the architecture for a number of projects for the education of health professionals in the area of electronic health records.