sense® - smart eHealth solutions

The growing number of medical specializations, the rising life expectancy, the aging population and multimorbidity produce nowadays high amounts of data and therefore high costs in the healthcare sector.
This impact makes it necessary to develop new ways of communication between healthcare institutions to reach a better and more efficient collaboration between healthcare providers. The aim of these measures is to strengthen patient rights and adjust the provision of medical treatment according to the patients needs.
Since 2002 our team out of different specialists in the field of ehealth, works on the development of a cross-institutional network using well known, international standards like IHE. The usage of these standards should ensure a secure and standardised exchange of medical documents between healthcare institutions.   
Sense® keeps the medical data and documents in decentralized storages. This means the documents are stored by the healthcare providers which produced them. This way of managing the data increases the data security and protects former investments done by the healthcare institutions. To be allowed to access medical documents, a written permission signed by the patient is required. Sense® offers the possibility to access medical documents and images independent of time and place and only through authorized medical professionals.

Background

The aim of sense® smart ehealth solutions is to make medical documents accessible for health professionals who participate in the treatment process of a patient. This makes it necessary to offer data at the right time and place for authorized medical personnel. Through that, the cooperation between healthcare professionals should be supported and improved. This leads to reduced costs, higher efficiency and higher patient safety, which prevents additional, unnecessary medical investigations.

Our Vision

Our team aims to develop products based on the newest research and technical findings in the field of cross-institutional healthcare.  Especially interoperability plays an important role.
Integrated and cooperative care should help to satisfy the needs of patients, increase patient satisfaction and improve quality of care.

Concept

The concept of the shared electronic health record is based on the internationally well known IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) Integration Profile XDS. This profile supports inter alia the decentralized storage of medical data in the hospital or practice where the data was produced and takes care that only authorized medical personnel has access to the network.

Authorization Procedure

Sense® implemented several security standards working together to ensure a high security level for the exchange of all kind of medical data and documents within a network. 
One of the most important security components is the “Role Based Access Control”. It is based on the principle of XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) and responsible for the administration of defined access rights for the different groups of health care professionals.
An additional security component is used to realize an appropriate authorization level controlled by the patient. Through this component it is possible for a patient to restrict the access to his or her medical documents for certain health care professionals. The IHE ATNA (Audit and Node Authentification) Integration Profile is used to register the interactions between the sense® components. In addition to that certain security measures are used to control the authentification between the different components. For that reason sense® components fulfill the highest IHE security regulations and are classified as “Secure Nodes”. Secure authentification procedures based on XUA (Cross-Enterprise User Assertion) together with the newest security technologies using digital certificates ensure such a high level of data security.