From an IT perspective, Clalit Health Service’s 14 hospitals, 1,300 clinics and other institutes operated as information “islands”; that separation was further compounded by a heterogeneous technology environment, including tens of different legacy and health records systems.
Using a federated and de-centralized web-based architecture, Clalit and Israeli software company, dbMotion, created an enterprise-wide medical information sharing system able to query asynchronously the entire set of local repositories, integrate the responses and present the caregiver with a unified, integrated “Virtual Patient Record” for viewing only, all within seconds. The system was later extended by Clalit to include large competitor medical centers to create a Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) and Health Information Exchange (HIE).
Medical information sharing is an organizational norm throughout Clalit Health Services. For other organizations considering establishing a Medical Information Sharing Network there now exists a reference project that has been operational long enough to be judged success or failure.
Download these two papers and read more: Medical Information Sharing in Clalit Health Services, Israel - ; FAQs - Medical Information Sharing in Clalit Health Services, Israel -
If you found these papers interesting you might want to look at these other papers:
- Business Intelligence & Information Management. Learning from the Clalit Health Services experience -
- Improving Healthcare through eHealth. A working model from Clalit Health Services -
Have a look at what the EU EHR-Impact study says about Medical Information Sharing in Israel (the study was commissioned by DG INFSO and Media, unit ICT for Health):
The socio-economic impact of the electronic health records and health information network in Israel