Summary
Objectives:
Forming the informational reflection of the patients and their care, the Electronic
Health Record (EHR) is the core application of any complex health information system
or health network. Such an ideally lifelong history file must be reliable, flexible,
adaptable to new concepts and technologies, and robust, to allow for sharing knowledge
over its lifetime. A sophisticated architecture must be chosen for meeting this challenge.
Methods:
An advanced EHR architecture for designing and implementing future-proof EHR systems
must be a model of generic properties required for any Electronic Patient Record to
provide communicable, comprehensive, useful, effective, and legally binding records
that preserve their integrity over the time, independent of platforms and systems
as well as of national special-ties. The resulting approach is based on the ISO Reference
Model – Open Distributed Processing.
Results:
Based on advanced architectural principles introduced in the paper, a new generation
of EHR systems has been designed and implemented for demonstrating the feasibility
of the approach. This result is presented and evaluated regarding the achievements
and problems using the component-based paradigm of model-driven health information
system architectures.
Conclusions:
The future-proof EHR approach that has been established has been shortly evaluated.
Advantages regarding flexibility, reliability, and portability of policy-driven, highly
secure, role-dependent applications have to be considered in the light of performance
as well as of the availability of network and application services.
Keywords
Electronic health record - meta-languages - components - model-driven architecture
