The Pacific Free Clinic Online
Founded in 2003, Pacific Free Clinic provides free health care
services for adults in the East San Jose area with low-income, no insurance,
and/or low English proficiency. This valuable community service is open
to all regardless of immigration status. Some of the services provided
by the clinic include outpatient care, referrals to long term care facilities,
free laboratory tests, free medications and prescription vouchers, health
screenings and health education.
The students asked IRT for help creating a HIPAA
compliant medical record repository from which they could generate certain
simple reports and statistics. Perhaps the single most important requirement
of the new application is that it supply the HIPAA mandated security checks
to prevent unauthorized viewing of patient data. The prior practice of
toting a laptop computer around was only as secure as the laptop itself;
if the laptop were to be lost or stolen, all the sensitive patient data
on its hard drive could be compromised.
The development staff decided to make this project a showcase for medical
record repository technology. The resultant application is a secure three
tier J2EE (Java) web application running on JBoss and Oracle. Anyone with
a web browser can browse to the site, but only those with valid SUNet-Ids
can register as a volunteer, and only volunteers to whom clinic administrators
have granted additional access rights can see patient data.
Some other features of the application:
- Clinic volunteers sign up for a slot using the online scheduling calendar
- The clinic managers create and annotate weekly reports documenting
the clinic's operations
- Reminders are automatically emailed to clinic volunteers each week, reminding
them of their committment
- The grant writers need certain statistics to keep the project funded;
the web app supplies an up-to-the-minute snapshot of all the data they
need from the online patient charts
Interested in volunteering at the Pacific Free Clinic? Browse to http://pacific.stanford.edu/
and click on "New Volunteer".
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