A distributed architecture for hospital management systems with synchronized EHR

Abstract

The healthcare domain in India is rapidly evolving with multiple healthcare and Hospital Management Information Systems (HMIS) being deployed at various medical facilities. However, aggregation and analytics on standardized healthcare datasets is possible only when these isolated systems are integrated on a common platform for exchange of patient Electronic Health Record (EHR) and data interoperability is facilitated. This presents a challenge due to the heterogeneous nature of systems and operational or policy-based restrictions in integrating them. In this paper, we present a distributed HMIS architecture which allows for integration of multiple stand-alone HMIS on a common platform that enables interoperability via EHR sharing and aggregation of standardized data for enabling analytics and visualization. Additionally, the proposed architecture also facilitates local, standalone deployments at primary medical facilities which are configured for local requirements and also synchronize essential datasets at the central node for enabling analytics. The deployment of this distributed architecture has also enabled uniformity and transparency in healthcare service delivery, while also facilitating better management and monitoring of available resources for efficient administration and governance.