Achieving e-health care in a distributed EHR system

In modern health care, use of Web based EHR (electronic health record) system has increased remarkably because of its world-wide accessibility and the facility of the collaborative work among multiple users. Major drawbacks of such centralized Web based system are link failure and low or no fault tolerance. In an unreliable network, it is very commonplace that service is unavailable due to connection failure. The problem motivates us to devise a decentralized system that would work seamlessly in unreliable Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we have presented such an e-healthcare system (named iMedikD) which supports both local and centralized access where hospitalwise responsibility is delegated among multiple peripheral servers. Therefore, by lowering the dependency over the external links the system is able to keep the peripheral services running uninterrupted. Only in case of remote referral, peripheral servers communicate through external links to Web based servers with a view to minimize bandwidth utilization.