Medical portals: web-based access to medical information

Public portals, such as Web search engines, have been available for a number of years and corporate portals that facilitate access to enterprise information within a company, normally through the Web, have been available for the last few years. Such portals are made up of 'channels' of information and the purpose of these portals is to provide an interface that presents an organized view of the data to which the user has access, i.e., a straight forward means of access to this data. Both public and corporate portals provide access to potentially vast amounts of complex, distributed information through a Web browser. The infrastructures are based on Web technologies and the common interface is the Web browser. Medical information is vast, complex and distributed. Similar to corporate and public portals, medical portals can provide the medical community with access to medical information through the Web browser. Appropriate portals and channels within those portals can be defined to provide access from the desk of the physician, the hospital administrator, the insurer or the consumer of health services. This paper discusses medical portals that can provide such Web-based access to medical information and describes a three-tier Web architecture to support such access.