An evaluation of hospital information systems integration approaches

Abstract

Healthcare organisations aim to provide high-quality, cost-effective healthcare delivery; to do this they must manage a large amounts of information. A fundamental concern in health management is the integration of health information across distributed, heterogeneous and disparate information systems. Various integration approaches have been attempted by healthcare organizations to solve the problems associated with this integration. However, the variety of approaches means that selecting the appropriate integration approach is problematic. This paper aims to analyse and evaluate current integration approaches in the healthcare domain. It attempts to clarify the issues surrounding the adoption of integration solutions in this domain for both healthcare decision-makers and system integrators.