Electronic Health Centre (eHC) - a web site for continuing education of general practitioners

Jadranka Bozikov, Hrvoje Ivekovic, Josipa Kern, Denis Mladinic-Vulic

The Electronic Health Centre (eHC) is aimed as an Internet service for continuing medical education of general practitioners (GPs) at the national level. It integrates education, access to relevant and trusted information sources and group communication in order to meet the needs of both daily work and continuing education at home. . The project goal is to establish information infrastructure that will enable and support the individual activities of GPs and their collaborators on continuing education and communication, focusing on problems of daily practice. In the future it is planned to integrate eHC into the existing accreditation system. The very first version of eHC was launched in the fall of 2000 and hosted at the Andrija Stampar School of Public Health server, URL:http://www.snz.hr/edz. The project was accepted and supported by one-year grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Croatia within the framework of IT Implementation in October 2001. In order to fulfil eHC objectives the content has been structured in several modules: Teaching room, Links, Address book, Forum, Counselling for patients, Calendar of events, and Contacts. Gradually, new components would be added depending on interest like teleconferences, streamed video, chat, etc. Registration procedure for module Forum would be necessary and its implementation is now under way. It is necessary to ensure hiding of patient data from patients (although cases are presented without personal data).