HEALTHCARE INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN A NETWORK ENVIRONMENT An Interoperability Model and a Real Case in a Pathology Network

Interoperability between Healthcare Management Systems is a fundamental requirement to improve the quality of care, to assure patients continuous assistance and to improve clinical research. Pathology Networks create a common virtual environment which allows to overcome single HIS' borders, by connecting different healthcare organizations adopting common formats to share clinical data and, consequently, knowledge. Syntactic and semantic standards are paramount to enable interoperability in this context, since common document formats ensure efficient communication, while internationally known vocabularies allow the unambiguous interpretation of contents. This paper has the purpose to show a real experience of participation to a Pathology Network, providing a model based on open standards which could be taken as a reference model for similar initiatives in other healthcare environments. Benefits resulting from such an initiative will be presented, in terms of improvement for clinical research and quality of patients' care. The real case we describe is an example of how Pathology Networks can provide scientific features to Electronic Health Records, by adding information not usually reported on standard clinical sheets, but necessary to perform new analysis with the purpose of improving clinical research.