Development of a medical information portal for managerial, educational and academic purposes

ABSTRACTThe growth of the Internet has led to new technological advances that yieldednew approaches to document and information management/sharing solutions calledportals or super sites. A portal consists of different services providing searchfunction. These services can allow customization of service properties with respect todifferent user types? different preferences. Portals may help organizations reach theirtargets by providing organizational facilities like easy and fast access of information,provided that they move their business and working environment into the portals.In this study, a portal that consists of a document management service for theBiostatistics and Medical Informatics Department and two other services; medicaldictionary and academic schedule; for the students of Medical School are designedand developed. For document management purposes, the portal contains specificdocument workspaces and document libraries for incoming documents, outgoingdocuments, thesis, and assignments. The portal assigns a ?working space? for eachuser/employee. A typical working space contains task lists, contact lists andannouncements. The medical dictionary service provides a querying facility for themeaning of medical terms. A user can query the meaning of a medical term using asimple Web-based interface designed using Microsoft?s Web Forms technology. Theacademic schedule service allows students of Medical School to access the scheduleof a specific date in an academic year. A student can query the schedule of a specificdate based on the class and committee information using a stepwise interface, whichwas designed using Microsoft?s Web Forms technology, as well. The platform thatwas adopted to realize the departmental document management and sharing serviceis Microsoft?s Sharepoint Portal Server 2003. For the development of other twoservices three-tier software architecture was implemented. The data managementlayers of the services were designed based on the Entity-Relationship data model andthe design was implemented using MS Access. The business and processmanagement layers were implemented using ASP.NET platform with Visual Basicprogramming language. The presentation layers, which basically contain theinterfaces, were implemented using HTML and Web Forms.Additionally, in this study, the time that it takes to complete necessarydatabase operations as the database for the medical terms dictionary service enlargeswas measured in order to estimate the response time of the service to a visitor/user.As a result, the measurements realized using medical terms databases that containsdifferent number of medical terms have yielded a tolerable mean response time fordatabase operations.In this study, a prototype portal that consists of services, which allowsusers/visitors access to medical information, has been developed. New services basedon academic and educational needs will be added later. For this purpose, Web logsfor service usage and feedbacks from the users/visitors will be collected andexamined.Keywords: World Wide Web, information services, documentation,etymology, vocabulary, dictionary, medical dictionary.v