Household of care in electronic health information exchange systems

Abstract

The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise advocates for the integration of distributed and heterogeneous health information systems. This is achieved through the development of standards that specifies protocols through which the integrated systems can communicate as profiles. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise through its Information Technology Infrastructure Technical Framework Volume 2b Transaction B provides a Patient Identification Segment which provides a way in which a patient’s demographic details can be exchanged among the systems within a Health Information Exchange ecosystem. In the South African context however, healthcare services are extended to communities through community healthcare workers that make visits to households. There is therefore a need to manage households in a similar way that patients are managed in a health information exchange systems. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise standards currently does not have explicit profiles in their standards that can be utilised in managing households in Health Information Exchange systems. As opposed to patients being treated as subjects of care, households are treated as subjects of care by community healthcare workers. In this paper we present a way which we use to represent households and it follows the Health Level Seven standards format.We also present an implementation of a Enterprise Master Household Index equivalent to a Enterprise Master Patient Index that utilises our proposed profile.