A distributed integration system enabling electronic health records: an Italian experience

Today distributed systems are commonly employed in patient data management to improve the care process. Moreover, distributed systems can be usefully applied to realise lean and flexible architectures that facilitate healthcare structure interoperability. Systems used in healthcare structures are characterised by proprietary data flow formats and encoding systems, which hinder the possibility of sharing data in a standard format, and extracting atomic data for further analysis. This paper describes the architecture of a distributed interoperability system able to structure flow data into standard formats and send them to an advanced electronic health record designed as part of the Smart Health 2.0 project (PON04a2-C). The use of the distributed interoperability system within the experimental phase of the electronic health record highlights the flexibility of the proposed solution in meeting the reality of the healthcare structures involved.