Contextualized Access to Electronic Health Records - Application to Hospital Interoperability

Everyday more hospitals develop their own Electronic Health Record (EHR) Systems to improve the accessibility to the information on it. There are some standards and proposals to homogenize the structure of these EHR, but they use to be so generic, that the final EHR structure has so many particularities that is different in each hospital. This situation has created a huge problem of interoperability, since Hospital Information Systems (HIS) are not capable of communicating nor understanding each other. At this point it seems very difficult that all the Hospital Information Systems change their EHR structures into a common one, to get this communication capability. Proposals to solve this issue require to create a common EHR or to translate all the existing EHR structures into a common one, and both cases seem to be unapproachable. This is why we propose a different approach based on the contextualized access to the information. The underlying idea is that the assistance acts, i.e. situations or contexts, where the information is acceded, as well as the data required for each, i.e pertinent information, is almost the same independently of the hospital where you are. Hence, it is not necessary to establish a correspondence between the EHRs, we only need to identify the context of the extern access and retrieve and send the information pertinent to it. In addition, our proposal also allows the adaptation to the needs of information of each medical doctor in each Hospital, as well as solves the problem of EHR fragmentation.