Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 1, number 1, 2009 // View article

Health Information Exchange and Care Integration

Authors:
Kari Harno
Pekka Ruotsalainen
Pirkko Nykänen
Kyösti Kopra

Keywords: Electronic patient records, interoperability, health information exchange, shared EHR, regional and national information networks, core data set, summary care record

Abstract:
The Finnish health care system is a mixture of public and private services. Its governance and funding is highly decentralized. Contrary to governmental policies and expectations, autonomous decisions by local authorities and service providers associated with lack of information models and common technical standards have led to a broad spectrum of one-off ICT –systems with little technical and semantic interoperability. National strategies to overcome these challenges have prompted initiatives to create sharable electronic health records (EHR) by supporting a collection of federated interoperable repositories with regional middleware services. In the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa an established regional eHealth network (RHIN) connects 24 public hospitals, 29 municipal health centers (primary care) and two private health care clinics. There are 7.500 end-users, information from 1,4 million citizens and 40 million links to EPRs. Migration to a national eHealth network (NHIN) providing a platform for delivery of a longitudinal view on patient’s relevant health records (summary care record) will assist care integration between providers and improve the safety and quality of healthcare.

Pages: 46 to 57

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 7, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660