Province-wide healthcare system integration challenge being solved in Alberta.

ver the past 10 years, Alberta has pioneered the development of a province-wide electronic health record (EHR). As a result, a number of the building blocks are already operational – for example, patient and provider registries, a pharmaceutical information network, a laboratory test results history system and electronic medical record systems are in many physicians’ offices. However, because these are stand-alone applications based on local databases, the full breadth of cross-province patient information cannot be accessed. The big challenge facing Alberta, therefore, is interconnecting these systems and information repositories so that data can be exchanged seamlessly. This would give authorized physicians, nurses, allied healthcare workers, managers and administrators a single point of electronic access to a patient’s complete medical profile and history province-wide. Work is already under way to interconnect disparate data systems and information repositories within Alberta’s individual health regions, such as the Calgary Health Region (CHR). Here, a regional integration engine provides a basic layer of operational connectivity, tying together various healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, laboratories and clinics), applications, patient indices and data repositories within the region. The result is an EHRlike capability at the regional level. A similar integration structure exists in the Capital Health Region based in Edmonton, and such structures are also being built within the Alberta Cancer Board and the Regional Shared Health Information Program, a partnership among the seven remaining Alberta healthcare regions, covering 92% of the province’s vast geography. “We are learning a lot of lessons from these regional initiatives,” says Linda Miller, assistant deputy minister, Alberta Health and Wellness (AHW). “They are generating a lot of interest – especially among physicians – as people begin to understand what an EHR really is and the value of the data beyond the bounds of any one healthcare organization.”