An Electronic Health Records Interoperability Model Among Hebron Hospitals In Palestine

Abstract

Many healthcare systems are increasingly using Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to facilitate care while maintaining streamlining processes for both physicians and patients. Nevertheless, to share patients' information, a connection is required among clinics and hospitals; these institutions may use different healthcare information systems which makes electronic sharing of health information more difficult. Significant advancement and efficient models were proposed and implemented in many developed countries in Europe and the States. These models were based on international standards designed specifically for data exchange among health care institutions with probably different information systems. However, such models are not being adopted in Palestine. Therefore, this work aims to first investigate the current state of EMR adoption in Palestine, as well as the readiness of various hospitals to implement EHR interoperability, and then to develop a suitable EHR interoperability model that will enable the seamless exchange of EHRs between different healthcare institutions in Palestine. The mixed-method approach was used to achieve the research goals. The qualitative findings based on interviews with IT specialists at Hebron District hospitals revealed that current EMR systems are of low level of capacity and clinical terminologies, and they do not use interoperability standards. The quantitative research based on a questionnaire that was collected from healthcare professionals working in Hebron District hospitals revealed that there is a lack of data exchange infrastructure, and reported that high cost is an obstacle for implementing interoperability at their institutions. Additionally, the analysis showed that physicians from all disciplines are optimistic about the prospects of electronically exchanging various health data since they see the benefits to society as a whole. Both quantitative and qualitative findings emphasized that there is no electronic exchange of EHRs among Hebron hospitals. III Based upon these findings, the author proposed a model named islEHR based on AI approaches and the HL7 FHIR interoperability standard for enabling data sharing in a standard format that humans and computers can use. The evaluation results indicated that islEHR can be used with a high level of accuracy and efficiency meaning that islEHR is a viable approach for sharing EHRs among Hospitals in Hebron and can be generalized for data sharing among hospitals in Palestine as well.