Abstract
One of the main challenges facing modern healthcare is the issue of how to decrease the fragmentation of digital patient data collected in different healthcare institutions. Patient data is archived in diferent data repositories and access to the data for a physician or other healthcare professional is possible through entering separaate credentials for each information system. Therefore, for a physician to get an overview of all patient data is often a tedious task.
Digital data sharing in healthcare requires the use of common data Exchange strandards from all healthcare providers. Otherwise, data provided by one information system is not readable by the other. To achieve digital ization of the whole clinical process, all data should be accessible according to a consensus standard. This includes, besides textual data, also medical investigations, graphs and administrative data.
In Estonia, digital textual data and medical images as well as their sharing in the electronic environment is relatively well regulated by using HL7 and DICOM standards. However, in order to use digitaal health information for generating digitaal services between health care institutions, IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) standard profiles should be adopted. The aim of the IHE profiles is to promote coordinated use of existing standards (HL7, DICOM, etc.) in order to ensure optimal patient diagnoosis and treatment. Information systems which are developed in accordance with IHE profiles are more compatible, easier to implement and allow more efficient use of health related information.
Standards and standard profiles allow physicians, other healthcare professionals and healthcare institutions to share different medical databases and workf lows to assure the best clinical and administrative result despite geographical location or time. The standard profile is a certain consensus framework which regulates the use of standards. The use of standard profiles allows to arrange data sharing in a way that information systems are not only used to process the data but also to support healthcare processes.
The aim of this article was to give an overview of the standards and standard profiles used in medical data and workf low sharing, to explain the importance of their use and to analyse possibilities to implement data exchange profiles like XDS and XDS-I in order to facilitate data exchange between different healthcare providers in Estonia.