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A Novel System Architecture for the National Integration of Electronic Health Records: A Semi-Centralized Approach

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Abstract

The goal of a national electronic health records integration system is to aggregate electronic health records concerning a particular patient at different healthcare providers’ systems to provide a complete medical history of the patient. It holds the promise to address the two most crucial challenges to the healthcare systems: improving healthcare quality and controlling costs. Typical approaches for the national integration of electronic health records are a centralized architecture and a distributed architecture. This paper proposes a new approach for the national integration of electronic health records, the semi-centralized approach, an intermediate solution between the centralized architecture and the distributed architecture that has the benefits of both approaches. The semi-centralized approach is provided with a clearly defined architecture. The main data elements needed by the system are defined and the main system modules that are necessary to achieve an effective and efficient functionality of the system are designed. Best practices and essential requirements are central to the evolution of the proposed architecture. The proposed architecture will provide the basis for designing the simplest and the most effective systems to integrate electronic health records on a nation-wide basis that maintain integrity and consistency across locations, time and systems, and that meet the challenges of interoperability, security, privacy, maintainability, mobility, availability, scalability, and load balancing.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of a 2 year research project which has been fully funded by a grant through King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)/National Plan for Science and Technology (NPST) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Grant number: 09-INF880-02

Conflicts of interest

No conflict of interest exists.

Authorship

Asma AlJarullah carried out the research and designed the system under the supervision of the second author, and wrote the manuscript. Samir El-Masri conceived the research idea, proposed the system, and reviewed final draft of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Asma AlJarullah & Samir El-Masri

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  1. Asma AlJarullah
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  2. Samir El-Masri
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Correspondence to Asma AlJarullah.

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AlJarullah, A., El-Masri, S. A Novel System Architecture for the National Integration of Electronic Health Records: A Semi-Centralized Approach. J Med Syst 37, 9953 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9953-4

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