The Iranian Integrated Care Electronic Health Record

Abstract

E-health plays a crucial role in E-government by proposing healthcare services based on information technology. However, the way to administer these services by using E-health solutions is one of the challenging issues. One of these significant challenges is how one integrates heterogeneous healthcare information of the different point of care systems. This paper introduces the Iranian integrated care electronic health record using the information gathered from several point-of-care systems in healthcare enterprises in Iran. This service-oriented architecture has a remarkable characteristic – its accessibility to medical knowledge and medical concepts through archetypes and ontology, respectively. The Ministry of Health and Medical Education of the Islamic Republic of Iran has designed and implemented this national architecture.

The Integrated Electronic Health System in Iranian health centers: benefits and challenges

“…Nowadays, many countries dedicate a part of their electronic health strategic plans to the design and implementation of EHR as one of their priorities [ 35 ]. Developing countries like Iran have also made efforts in this field.…”

A near real-time electronic health record-based COVID-19 surveillance system: An experience from a developing country

“…The MOHME developed a set of standards and services through which POCUs can exchange health information, and has also implemented a National Integrated Electronic Health Record System, known locally as SEPAS (Bitaraf et al, 2021b;Riazi et al, 2010Riazi et al, , 2014. In Iran, EHR is defined as the electronic collection of information related to the health of Iranian citizens, from birth to death, which is longitudinally maintained.…”

“…Hospital information systems can also exchange electronic health data, such as billing summaries, laboratory test results, prescriptions, diagnoses, and procedures through the SEPAS, which has a distributed architecture based on ISO 13606 and inspired by OpenEHR architecture (Bitaraf et al, 2021b;Riazi et al, 2010Riazi et al, , 2014. The software infrastructure instances are installed in different locations called SEPAS nodes, which are hosted by each medical university in the country.…”

“…In Iran, a number of software vendors have implemented a wide variety of health information systems, including, for example, hospital information systems, primary care information systems, and laboratory information systems. The Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME) has also established and implemented an integrated infrastructure for health information exchange ( Bitaraf et al, 2021b ; 2021c ). To electronically collect and exchange health data, any point of care unit (POCU) is now equipped with an information system (e.g., medical laboratories use laboratory information systems (LIS); hospitals use hospital information systems (HIS)).…”

“…As illustrated in Figure 1 , POCUs transfer data electronically through their corresponding SEPAS nodes. It is noteworthy that these data are as original as the data generated and used at POCUs, which means the systems can communicate and transfer necessary data without any additional data entry and workforce input ( Bitaraf et al, 2021b ). Despite these available health information infrastructures, the systems have not been widely used for public health information management and disease surveillance.…”