The hip status: a telemedical application.

Biomedical informatics and biomedical engineering are interdisciplinary sciences that are growing fast and have a significant impact on healthcare delivery. The University Medical Centre in Ljubljana and the Medical Faculty through its institutes have initiated the building of their own telemedicine systems. These systems concern only the medical informatics field. However, in this work a telemedical application that uses a combination of biomedical engineering methods and methods of biomedical informatics is presented. This telemedical application was built at the Department of Surgery and it was named "The Hip Status Application". Its aims are to provide services of preventive medicine and health promotion for people with potential problems with the hip-joint, guidance for people that have already underwent an operation of implantation of hip endoprosthesis, or have in any other way affected hip-joints, remote system consultation for diagnostic purposes, etc. The application is still under evaluation, and it is meant as a start of a new era of engineering-powered telemedical applications at the Department of Surgery following the trends in the most developed countries of the World.

From legacy systems towards modern health information systems.

This article describes an approach of transferring legacy hospital information system to a modern HIS, which would support requirements of modern information age. There are several reasons, which force us to perform such a migration: from the weakness of design of legacy system to the need of covering new technologies (such as Inter/intranet) and new business conditions. The transition should be gradual, therefore a multilevel approach to the data is suggested, enabling us the transition, as well as including of the new, upcoming standards. The process of transition was started by the system covering the doctor's work. Responses to this part were very positive; therefore, we estimate that we are on the right way. We, however, know that the transitions will be neither fast nor cheap and this is the reason we shall have to find some more solutions.

Doctor friendly electronic patient record.

In this paper we would like to show importance of using modern information technology in implementation and development of health information systems. Our main focus is on doctor's work. Doctors will use computer only if they will see clear advantages. Traditional data gathering and display are not sufficient, so modern software should provide speech interfacing and computer graphics in various applications and enable the use of electronic mail, hand held computers, electronic data interchange, etc. among other features. This paper tries to show the needs for applications of those features. They are already implemented as part of our hospital information systems.