An Infrastructure for the Exchange of Healthcare Information among Public Hospitals

Abstract

Healthcare Information Infrastructures for Public Hospitals, in the Republic of Sudan, especially Khartoum State, and Healthcare Information Exchange, are essential steps for civilizing Healthcare in Sudan. Better health is what we seek for our people, families, children, neighbours, friends and for everyone over the world. With the total number of Sudanese citizens which is approximately more than thirty-three million people, beneficiaries from the Sudanese public hospitals' facilities, which are work manually (most of them). It is clear that the manual systems of public hospitals in Sudan do not satisfy the reporting needs of beneficiaries (patients and medical staff). This kind of inefficiency and problems created by such a system include poor administration for clinical data, poor doctor-patient communication, poor communication among medical staff, unavailability of information about the patients timely, queuing, time-consuming, slow retrieval of data, paper wastage, poor data storage and the loss of patient’s medical information. The research methodology included Ethnography studies, Mock-up, Case studies, a framework and a prototype. This thesis presents a novel framework for Healthcare Information Infrastructure and Health Information Exchange (HIE). That introduces an effective Integrated Information System Model for Electronic Exchange of Healthcare Information among Public hospitals in the Republic of Sudan. In terms of information infrastructure; the backbone of healthcare information infrastructure and health Information exchange solution is highly secured and the modular IT information infrastructure are implemented for healthcare information exchange. The proposed framework provides seamless access to the existing patient information by standardizing and synchronizing care across hospital units as it allows the exchange of health information among public hospitals in Khartoum, Sudan. Also, the proposed framework and system can (potentially) be trusted, faster and more efficient than existing systems as it leads to shorter service time, quicker retrieval of data, less paper wastage, rich data storage, elimination of the loss of information, and enhancement of the work of the current public Sudanese hospitals systems.