The Electronic Health Record and its Contribution to Healthcare Information Systems Interoperability

One of the main advantages of using computational systems in the health care activity comes from their ability to provide useful information for decision making to health professionals. Thus, their main purpose is to increment the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery. In order to achieve these purposes, Health Information Systems must fulfill interoperability standards, quality, security, scalability, reliability and timeliness in data storage and processing terms. One of the main existing problems in this area is the fact that informatics applications do not share information, or share it in a very low level. When communication between different Health Information Systems exists, it is mainly achieved through proprietary integration solutions. In this paper is made a survey of the main advantages of Electronic Health Records and presented a proposal of some general guidelines for building them and promote the integration of different information resources.