VHI customers will soon be able to store their medical records online, providing 24-hour access for them or their doctor from any computer terminal in the world.
The new service, which is due to start in May, will be one of the benefits for customers as a result of a £4 million investment by the health insurance firm in an interactive healthcare portal.
Using the online service, the 1.5 million customers will be able to input their own details or fax documentation to the VHI for inputting. The VHI will also provide customers with the information which the company has about them, such as dates of claims for hospital treatments. Access to each personal file will only be possible using a user name and password. The VHI insisted yesterday that all information inputted would be held securely.
"We have been talking to the leading security companies," VHI's director of information technology, Mr John Creedon, said. "We will not put anything online that we cannot be sure will be 100 per cent secure."
The new service can also be used to remind customers of medical appointments, with customers logging the date when the appointment is first made, and the VHI e-mailing them reminders closer to the date.
As part of the enhanced service provided by VHI's e-commerce strategy, customers will also be able to log on and check their own membership details and cover. The new site will provide up-to-date information on health conditions, treatments and preventive medicines as well as healthcare information, categorised by life stage.
The VHI chief executive, Mr Oliver Tattan, said the service was in response to national research which showed that health was one of the three most popular information topics sought by Irish consumers. A third of the VHI's 1.5 million customers would be Internet users by 2001.
The new portal will also feature a number of services aimed at strengthening the firm's business-to-business market. The new site will enable the administrators of VHI's 7,000 corporate group schemes to receive monthly bills with a breakdown of costs for each individual scheme member.
Mr Creedon said the service would help the VHI retain existing membership and keep down administrative costs. In the coming years the firm hoped it would develop as a sales mechanism and it also intended selling advertising on the site.