Abstract
Information Technology is an important part of the healthcare environment. Accuracy and integrity of the information in any hospital system is necessary. Then, this information has to be up-to-date as well to achieve continuous quality improvement in any organization and particularly in a complex area like healthcare. Therefore, diverse information systems must be integrated across the healthcare enterprise. The main objective of this research is to develop a framework for the exchange of patients records located in different hospitals in Saudi Arabia, adding insurance and prescriptions information along with the patient's record to facilitate the insurance process and to automate the medicine prescription process that is currently manual in most hospitals. The proposed framework aims to improve the regular ways of obtaining patients medical records separated in each hospital. For instance, if a particular patient has different medical records in different hospitals visited by that patient, our architecture focuses on the method by which data should be searched and retrieved efficiently from a database on the cloud from different hospitals by preprocessing the data in current hospital's and saving them in the database that resides on the cloud. Our system design is based on cloud computing service oriented architecture. Some of the information included in these medical records is: medical history, prescribed medications and allergies, immunization status, laboratory and test results, radiology images, personal stats like age and weight, diagnoses, order tests and appointments. All of these records are identified by the national ID of the patient. these systems will be utilized by web services asp. net based framework, the doctor will use his/her ID and password to enter the system for security and then enter the patient's ID to send a request for that patient's record that will be sent back to the doctor, the record will be up-to-date since the last visit of the patient to any hospital in Saudi Arabia. The main aim of this study is to provide a data exchange model of patients records, it is used to decrease the time and cost of patients, and help doctors to get up-to-date and accurate information of patients from the records from any hospital in Saudi Arabia. By using e-Patient medical records and Mirth Connect program which use HEALTH LEVEL 7 (HL7) protocol. HL7 protocol is a standard information format of healthcare for data exchange. We provide a single, complete automated patient medical record to give a better patient care that avoids medical mistakes due to lack of information and unavailability of medical records.