Architectural Key Dimensions for a Successful Electronic Health Record Implementation

The availability of patient clinical data can be vital to a more effective diagnosis and treatment, by an healthcare professional. This information should be accessible regardless of context, place, time or where it was collected. In order to share this type of data, many countries have initiated projects aiming to implement Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Throughout the years, some were more successful than others but all of them were complex and difficult to materialise. The research involves the study of four international projects – in Canada, Denmark, England and France – launched with the goal of fostering the clinical data sharing in the respective countries, namely by implementing EHR-like systems. Those case studies served as data to identify the critical issues in this area. To address the challenge of sharing clinical information, the authors believe to be necessary to act in three different dimensions of the problem: (1) the engagement of the stakeholders and the alignment of the system development with the business goals (2) the building of complex systems of systems with the capability to evolve and easily admit new peers (3) the interoperability between different systems which use different conventions and standards.

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