Mario Beyer

Towards a flexible, process-oriented IT architecture for an integrated healthcare network

Healthcare information systems play an important role in improving healthcare quality. As providing healthcare increasingly changes from isolated treatment episodes towards a continuous medical process involving multiple healthcare professionals and institutions, there is an obvious need for an information system to support processes and span the whole healthcare network. A suitable architecture for such an information system must take into account that it has to work as an integral part of a complex socio-technical system with changing conditions and requirements. We have surveyed the core requirements of healthcare professionals and analysed the literature for known problems and information needs. We consolidated the results to define use cases for an integrated information system as communication patterns, from which general implications on the required properties of a helathcare network information system could be derived. Key issues are flexibility, adaptability, robustness, integration of existing systems and standards, semantic compatibility, security and process orientation. Based on these results an IT architecture is being designed that is capable of addressing the requirements mostly on the basis of well-established standards and concepts.

Informationsintegration in Gesundheitsversorgungsnetzen

Informationssysteme sind im Gesundheitswesen von hoher Bedeutung, und aktuelle gesundheitspolitische Entwicklungen forcieren ihren Ausbau.

Health Information Systems (Informationssysteme im Gesundheitswesen)

Summary Hospital Information Systems have been emerging towards Health Information Systems (HIS) for more than a decade. Systems have spread across institutional borders, and regional health networks are being supported. Furthermore, E-Health is starting to become a reality. In the same time, HIS functionality has significantly improved: systems have become by far more comprehensive, providing essential information and knowledge to health care professionals, supporting quality management, improving patient safety, and providing means to inform patients. Old and new problems, however, remain to be solved, and significant challenges exist. Among them are the need for flexibility, extensibility, seamless integration, and adaptation to work processes. Health Information Systems need to cope with change and with the evolution of medical concepts. Continuous quality improvement of distributed health care processes needs to be supported. The underlying IT infrastructure has to gradually overcome semantic heterogeneity of systems, and to provide support for inter-institutional workflow. In this article, we will present both challenges and architectural approaches for future HIS.