Interoperability model for health information systems and associated benefits challenges and approach

Abstract

Recent IT advancements have resulted digital collection of health related information. There exist diverse health information systems today, each addressing a speci c need in the healthcare domain e.g. Hospital Information System collecting clinical, patient and administrative data; Health Management and Information Systems (HMIS) collecting health indicators across an area (such as mortality, births and vaccination) and systems for Telemedicine to provide access to healthcare for areas that are not easily accessible. Integrating the information collected across such diverse systems can be technically challenging, primarily due to the di erent data models and work ows being adopted to address speci c requirements catered by such systems. However, such integration can provide signi cant bene ts such as single point of access, detailed and real-time analysis and reduction in duplication of information. In this work, we present a case study of integrating OpenMRS based hospital information systems and DHIS2 based HMIS deployed across the state of Himachal Pradesh (HP), India. OpenMRS based system is now deployed across 20 hospitals in the state while the DHIS2 based system is used for data collection from multiple reports under NRHM program. We used WHO backed interface for statistical data and metadata exchange in healthcare called SDMX-HD for data communication across the systems. We present the system architecture in detail and provide discussion on challenges and learning from development and deployment of such a system across the state of HP. We also discuss the data being collected at present and some analysis which can done to get useful insights from this data. We also looked into some external factors which might be in uencing the healthcare setting in the state.