HIS interoperability among health care centers: Case of Iran

Interoperability is needed at the time that hospital information system (HIS) data should be combined and shared with different systems. This study was aimed to determine the semantic and technical interoperability of hospital information systems of Iran's health care centers and propose guidelines to create and develop these centers interoperability. This descriptive study was conducted on companies, which were qualified to receive performance appraisal certificate of HIS soft wares from statistics and information technology office of health ministry. Standard questionnaire and checklist were used to collect information in the first and second steps, respectively. List of companies, which provided and produced HIS in Iran, was collected, and then a self-administered questionnaire was sent for them. Next, a health care center was selected from each company through random clustering sampling, and its current HIS interoperability was evaluated. Data were analyzed using SPSS 16. Based on the results from 15 companies, all companies were used Microsoft windows and SQL server database in their HIS with consideration to technical interoperability. Also, the most frequent corporate programming language was Visual C Sharp (46.7%) and Visual Basic (40%), respectively. From semantic interoperability aspect, the most frequent terminology systems were ICD-10(86.7%), ICD-9CM (66.7%), and CPT (66.7%), respectively. For standard messaging, 60%, 46.7% and 33.3% used XML, DICOM, and HL7 in order. Health system interoperability is divided into two semantic and technical groups. Now, there is not any standard for electronic health record (EHR) to provide full interoperability. HIS templates should be provided in order to make a national standard for EHR. Therefore, it is necessary to have standard template for semantic and technical interoperability in EHR national exchanges. (Mehraban Shahi, Farahnaz Sadoughi, Nasrin Davaridolatabadi, Kamal Ebrahimi, HIS interoperability among health care centers: Case of Iran.. Life Sci J 2013;10(7s):741-744) (ISSN:1097-8135). http://www.lifesciencesite.com. 116