FEDERATED HEALTH-CARE RECORD SERVER - THE SYNAPSES PARADIGM

The delivery of healthcare relies on the sharing of patient informatio n between those who are providing for the care of the patient and this information is increasingly being expressed in terms of a 'record'. F urther, it is desirable that these records are available in electronic form as Electronic HealthCare Records. As it is likely that patient r ecords or parts of records will be stored in many different informatio n systems and in the form of disparate record architectures, uniform a ccess to patient records would be problematic. This paper presents an overview of the Synapses computing environment in which a Federated He althcare Record Server provides uniform access to patient information stored in connected heterogeneous autonomous information systems and o ther Synapses servers. The Synapses record architecture is based on th e architecture proposed by the Technical Committee 251 of the European Committee for Standardisation and the interfaces to the Synapses serv er are specified in the ISO standard Interface Definition Language. Sy napses is a pan-European project involving a number of hospitals, soft ware companies, universities and research institutes and is partly fun ded by the EU Health Telematics Programme. The overview is described i n terms of the Open Distributed Processing Reference Model. (C) 1998 E lsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.