Migration from Regional to a National eHealth Network

Abstract

Finland is being transformed into a knowledge economy driven by information and communication technologies - 96 % of primary care health centres, 95 % of hospital districts and 89 % of private sector service providers use an electronic patient record (EPR). The governance and funding of the Finnish health care system is very decentralized and the lack of standards has led to a broad spectrum of one-off systems with little technical interoperability. National strategies to overcome this challenge has created sharable electronic health records (EHR) by supporting a collection of federated interoperable repositories with regional middleware services. In the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa an established regional eHealth network (RHIN) connects 24 public hospitals, 29 municipal health centers (primary care) and two private health care clinics. There are 6.000 end-users, information from 1,4 million citizens and 12 million links to EPRs. Migration to a national eHealth network (NHIN) and centralized eArchive providing a platform that delivers a longitudinal view of a patient's relevant health records (core data set) is currently underway and plans for coordinated architecture and transformation from regional to national sharing of health care information and ePrescription are drawn.