Critical assessment of healthcare informatics standards (original) (raw)

The Role of Information Standards for Effective Management of Health Information Systems

Information systems play a significant role in helping to improve health outcomes and decision-making at the point of care, as well as in the planning and funding of care. There is no doubt that new technologies, especially information and communication technologies, could dramatically contribute to achieve better results in our activities in general. The healthcare sector, one of the largest sectors of society accounting, is very complex with many different application requirements. There are also a number of different types of actors that need to communicate for various healthcare purposes (patients/citizens, healthcare professionals and organizations providing health care cervices, payment bodies, pharmaceutical industry, the national governments). Standardization is the first and the most important step in building an Integral Healthcare Information System. However, standardization has been recognized in most of the countries as an important tool to achieve some of the general g...

Standards to Support Interoperability of Healthcare Information Systems

2016

Abstract: There is growing concern over the fragmentation and inability of healthcare information systems (e-health systems) to exchange pertinent healthcare information that can empower healthcare professionals to make informed decisions regarding the care of their patients. Standardisation is increasingly being seen as a means to ensure the interoperability of e-health systems. However, several e-health standards are being published, many of them without implementation guidelines. This paper describes a proposed method that could guide the selection of e-health standards (particularly for developing countries) to support the interoperability of e-health systems.

What is done, what is needed and what is realistic to expect from medical informatics standards

International Journal of Medical Informatics, 1998

Medical informatic experts have made considerable progress in the development of standards for orders and clinical results (CEN, HL7, ASTM), EKG tracings (CEN), diagnostic images (DICOM), claims processing (X12 and EDIFAC) and in vocabulary and codes (SNOMED, Read Codes, the MED, LOINC). Considerable work still remains to be carried out. Abstract models of health care information have to be created, to cover the necessary domain, and yet be simple enough to assimilate, implement, and manage. This requires a high degree of abstraction. Enormous amounts to develop standardized vocabulary are still required to complement such a model, and to define the subsets that apply to given contexts.

The significance of information standards for development of integrated health information system

Archive of oncology, 2006

Information systems play a significant role in helping to improve health outcomes and decision-making at the point of care, as well as in the planning and funding of care. There is no doubt that new technologies, especially information and communication technologies, could dramatically contribute to achieve better results in our activities in general. The healthcare sector, one of the largest sectors of society accounting, is very complex with many different application requirements. There are also a number of different types of actors that need to communicate for various healthcare purposes (patients/citizens, healthcare professionals and organizations providing health care cervices, payment bodies, pharmaceutical industry, the national governments). Standardization is the first and the most important step in building an Integral Healthcare Information System. However, standardization has been recognized in most of the countries as an important tool to achieve some of the general g...

IT-Standards and Standardization Approaches in Healthcare

2008

E-health basically comprises health services and in- formation delivered or enhanced through the Internet and related technologies (Eysenbach, 2001). The future healthcare system and its services, enabling e-health, are based on the communication between all information systems of all participants of an integrated treatment. Connecting the elements of each healthcare system (general practitioners, hospitals, health insurance companies, pharmacies, and so on)—even across national borders—is an important issue for information systems research in healthcare. Current developments, such as upcoming or already-deployed electronic healthcare chip cards (that are to be used across Europe), show the need for Europe-wide standards and norms (Schweiger, Sunyaev, Leimeister, & Krcmar, 2007). In this article, we first outline the advantages of the standards, and then describe their main characteristics. After the introduction of communication standards, we present their comparison with the aim to support the different functions in the healthcare information systems. Subsequently, we describe the documentation standards, and discuss the goals of existing standardization approaches. Implications conclude the article.

Usage of Standards to Integration of Hospital Information Systems

Frontiers in Health Informatics

Introduction: Data exchange across healthcare facilities is a major issue in healthcare information systems. Standards play an important role in the context of communication. In this paper, we surveyed the usage of standards in the hospital information systems (HISs) in the affiliated hospitals of Tehran University of Medical Sciences.Material and Methods: This survey was performed in 2014-2015. A total of 17 hospitals with HISs were surveyed. The data were collected using a structured questionnaire. The design of the questionnaire was based on a literature review and consisted of three parts. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.Results: XML, HL7 and DICOM are commonly used international interchange standards. In the case of security standards, 76.5% of HISs do not support the HIPPA and CEN TC 251 security standards. ICD was the most commonly used terminology standard in the HISs. Several studies have indicated that HISs should cover data exchange, security and ter...

Standardization Framework for Legacy Health Information Systems

The construction of a Virtual Federated Electronic Health Record (VFEHR) requires using standards, tools and an adequate technological infrastructure. We have developed LinkEHR as a framework platform for the standardization, integration and sharing of health information among distributed and heterogeneous Health Information Systems. To perform this task, LinkEHR trusts in archetypes as a mechanism for semi-authomatic normalization of legacy data. This framework has already been evaluated in existing health institutions for the construction of standardized extracts of the EHR.