Design elements of a telemedical medical record

Computerized Patient Records are becoming telemedical and multimedia documents. They should accompany the patients their whole lifetime and collect data from many different sites. Special requirements are arising to fulfill these demands. A prototype of such a system was designed and implemented at the university hospital in Grosshadern, Germany to show its feasibility, discuss the design elements and demonstrate its capabilities. A Flexible data model, interpretable contents, open communication structures and physical compilation are the cornerstones of this approach that allows communication via Internet or Smart cards.