Building a generic architecture for medical information exchange among healthcare providers

Due to the inability to exchange clinical information among hospitals, cont inuity of care cannot be maintained and a tremendous amount of medical reso urce has been wasted. This paper describes an architecture that would facil itate exchange of clinical information among heterogeneous hospital informa tion systems. It is dubbed;Medical Information Exchange Center' or MIEC as part of a six-year Health Information Network Project hosted by the Departm ent of Health. MIEC was designed so that it is innovative yet technically f easible today. It is convenient for authorized users yet secure enough so p eople can trust and has minimal impact to participated hospitals. Authorize d users will be able to access information through two web-based interfaces directed to physician and non-physician users respectively. Hospitals are connected through a virtual private network to exchange patient information and users need to obtain a private key from the certificate authority in o rder to securely connect to MIEC. A pilot project was conducted to demonstr ate the feasibility of this architecture and the problems encountered wen d iscussed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.