Health information systems of tomorrow

Health information systems today suffer from a number of significant problems. Challenges which need to be met by the systems of tomorrow include:

• Support for a life-long health record
• True interoperability among all parties and systems used in patient care
• Intelligent decision support
• Domain size and rate of change
• Systems obsolescence
• Multi-contact healthcare system and mobile patients
• Multiple medical cultures, including developing world, asian
• Support for domain experts to have direct control over the information design and change management of their systems

This document discusses the challenges for health information systems of the (immediate) future, and offers some suggestions for how the work of both standards bodies and implementation efforts might be brought together in the form of global standards for health information systems, particularly EHR (electronic health record; note that in this document, the term EHR is used to mean all variants, e.g. CPR, EMR and so on).