The 'Holy Grail' of Interoperability of Health Information Systems: Challenges and Implications

摘要

Enabling integration between heterogeneous health information systems (IS) across different institutions is attracting growing interest from national and regional governments. "Interoperability of health information systems" is an overall goal to strive for. This empirical paper addresses the challenges of integrating heterogeneous health information systems with the goal of achieving semantic interoperability of patient information within and between all hospitals in a health region. The paper describes a complex development and integration process, and looks into a promising strategy of using openEHR archetypes as an architecture to reach the goal of interoperability.