An Environment for the Creation of an Integrated Electron- ic Health Record in HYGEIAnet, the Regional Health Telematics Network of Crete* 1
Dimitrios G. Katehakis, P. Lelis, Eleni Karabela, Manolis Tsiknakis, Stelios C. Orphanoudakis · 2000
National and international healthcare networks are increasingly used to facilitate the sharing of health-related information and meet the healthcare needs of an increasingly mobile population. In this context, the vision of the Integrated Electronic Health Record (I-EHR) enables autonomous healthcare facilities to operate in a coop-erative working environment and the delivery of seamless care. The Patient Clinical Data Directory (PCDD), as a central element of the overall architecture is a middleware component that provides clinical information on the distributed EHR segments maintained by autonomous information systems in a regional health-telematics network such as HYGEIAnet, the regional health-telematics network of the island of Crete. The PCDD main-tains a distributed registry of feeder systems, patient key demographics, and references to clinical objects (med-ical encounters) inside patient EHR segments. Feeder systems, supporting diverse access methods ranging from human-mediated to CORBA object references and HTTP URLs, are the clinical information systems that quali-fy as PCDD information sources. The PCDD middleware enables an I-EHR service that provides encounter-centered views of patient clinical data. The PCDD has been designed in the frame of the HYGEIAnet Reference Architecture (HRA), which provides a generic and evolving frame of reference for the reuse of services, components, and interfaces. This infrastruc-