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Development of a Web-based Anatomic Pathology Information System (AP-IS) in Brazil
Altino Leitão, MBA1, (altino@inca.gov.br); Paulo Faria 1, Adilson Yuuji Hira, MSc 2, André Nebel de Mello2, Marcelo Knörich Zuffo, PhD 2 ; 1 Instituto Nacional do Câncer (INCA) – Praça da Cruz Vermelha, 23, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil; 2 Laboratório de Sistemas Integráveis of the Escola Politécnica da USP, São Paulo, Brazil
Context: Comprehensive AP-IS are not well established in Brazil and other countries with low available resources for Health Care Services due to the high cost of development and support. Lack of AP-IS hinders the progress of Anatomic Pathology (AP) as a medical specialty in a moment when new technologies offer many features that could improve the quality of the service and patient safety. Also, AP-IS projects are important to Public Health as a tool for standardized reporting, interface with Electronic Medical Record, standardized coding for capturing, sharing, and aggregating health data across points of care and for cancer registries or other data bases. A web-based AP-IS will provide for a growing number of AP Services the resources that are long needed for a quality and safe modern practice.
Technology: The implementation and development of the applications are based on the use of free software and open platforms, using the JAVA, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and SQL (Structured Query Language) programming languages together with the adoption of the LINUX operational system in a solution that allows a reduction of the development costs.
Design: The AP-IS system described here is supported by a web-based computational database infrastructure and is focused in tracking the full AP exam chain from specimen admission to the electronic patient records related to the procedures. The system architecture refers to a largely adopted model for application remote services: the multi-tier model for WEB, with the use of distributed object oriented software components, which execute the business logic referent to anatomic pathology services. The system provides a user-friendly multimedia WEB interface, allowing easy and secure access to AP-IS, with different levels of access to the data according to the security rules for each user type.
Results: The web-based system described handles all of the operating functionalities required to manage Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology specimen studies and provides the foundation for interaction, data standardization and quality improvement.
Conclusions: We present here an open-source platform to Anatomic Pathology (AP), with a web-based relational database solution in response to the small number of AP-IS in Brazil, recognizing both current and potential future functionalities.