The Medical and Health Information Network (MAHIN) is a design concept for using Drupal, a content management system, in a distributed network to handle patient records and some aspects of patient care. I initially wrote about it on KnowProSE.com, but have not had the resources to pursue it as I had originally wished. It is open for anyone to pursue, and if that does happen I would like to be a part of the project if my time permits.
History
While in Guyana in 2005, I was doing volunteer work at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital which had no networked computer system. I was coordinating with the hospital, mainly through Dr. Surendra Persaud, on creating a network as well as website. Instead, Dr. Persaud and I ended up spending a lot of time talking about how different departments at a hospital could communicate with each other effectively.
It occurred to me that every patient record is a reverse chronological record. A medical blog. But a medical blog for each patient is simply too difficult to implement with blog software - so a content management system that could handle multiple blogs would be needed. When I explained this to Dr. Persaud, he took it a step further and asked about coordinating with the pharmacy, then the lab, then…
The idea is simple: When a Doctor orders testing, it goes into the patient chart - a blog entry of the patient visit and Doctor's Orders for the patient. Some customization would be needed to assure certain data was always available, but a content management system such as Drupal allows the use of forms, et al. From there, any tests ordered would toggle flags for different departments, such that only when a flag was set (Lab, X-Ray, etc) would the department have access to the record - and they would only be able to access what was ordered.
About there it seems to get complicated due to patient privacy concerns. However, a patient's lab tests, X-Rays or orders for medications from the pharmacy are easily held in separate tables in a database such that the different departments would see only what was necessary through a database query. From there, they could post their information…. on their instantiation of Drupal, it would be an entry. On the Doctor's/Wards instantiation of Drupal, it would be a comment to the original blog entry/orders.
This would require coordinated work between instantiations of Drupal, which might seem difficult - but not necessarily so. RSS feeds would help with this - and in the case of broader networks, could be encrypted such that a pharmacy outside of the hospital could utilize a pharmaceutical RSS feed for patients who they normally serve - something set up at the hospital itself.
My father passed away on August 2nd, 2005, and I never really got back to this concept due to… life. It was also named after my father (Mahin).
The design remains largely in my head, and I will try to remedy that here.
General Architecture
A basic diagram of how this would work is (original image available here):
