The Erlangen university hospital communication hub--proprietary and standardised communication.

The University of Erlangen-Nuremberg contains 22 hospitals and 11 autonomous medical departments which are spread out over a large area in the city of Erlangen. The necessary connections of these units and their computer based subsystems to each other and to the medical computer centre via fibre optics cables is complete. The internal cabling of the individual units is largely completed. Based on this network the Erlangen communication hub allows medical subsystems of the Erlangen university hospitals to exchange data by two completely different methods. Since 1995 a communication data base, which is implemented using the relational data base system ADABAS D, contains data from the most important hospital systems. This data can be accessed by other medical systems. Thus the communication data base allows subsystems which do not have a standardised interface to implement proprietary system interconnections via access based on SQL. The capabilities of this interconnection are dependent on both the implementation and the data which is made available by the communication data base. This contains mainly basic patient data and the results of tests performed by various laboratory systems. In addition to this proprietary communication system we have since the end of 1996 a communication server which can also handle standardised message formats such as HL7, EDIFACT, DICOM3. Future subsystems which possess standard interfaces will be connected via this server. The connection of the patient management system IS-H and the central laboratory system to the database has been proceeding since the beginning of 1997.