A model for integrating points of care testing into a distributed healthcare environment

Emerging Internet technologies are applied to create and manage a Virtual Laboratory Information System (VLIS), integrated into a distributed healthcare environment. The main objective of the system is to organise the transference of clinical testing from the traditional large central laboratories to a cooperative scheme of several manageable Points of Care Testing (POCTs). In other words, the goal of this model is to centralise just the relevant clinical data into each Hospital Information System (HIS), instead of concentrating the analyser instruments in outsized and expensive laboratories. The proposed solution is being developed and validated within the DLAB project - an international initiative partially funded by the European Commission and is described in this paper.