MedShare: Medical Resource Sharing among Autonomous Healthcare Providers

TL;DR

MedShare is a software framework that enables autonomous healthcare providers to share electronic health records securely and efficiently, addressing interoperability issues among legacy systems while maintaining data control and patient consent.

Contribution

This paper introduces MedShare, a novel architecture and set of tools for interoperability among disconnected healthcare systems, including data conversion, indexing, and secure sharing.

Findings

Enabled data exchange among three autonomous hospitals

Maintained patient data control and security

Addressed interoperability and consent issues

Abstract

Legacy Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems were not developed with the level of connectivity expected from them nowadays. Therefore, interoperability weakness inherent in the legacy systems can result in poor patient care and waste of financial resources. Large hospitals are less likely to share their data with external hospitals due to economic and political reasons. Motivated by these facts, we aim to provide a set of software implementation guidelines, i.e., MedShare to deal with interoperability issues among disconnected healthcare systems. The proposed integrated architecture includes: 1) a data extractor to fetch legacy medical data from a hemodialysis center, 2) converting it to a common data model, 3) indexing patient information using the HashMap technique, and 4) a set of services and tools that can be installed as a coherent environment on top of stand-alone EHRs systems. Our work enabled three cooperating but autonomous hospitals to mutually exchange medical data and helped them develop a common reference architecture. It lets stakeholders retain control over their patient data, winning the trust and confidence much needed towards a successful deployment of MedShare. Security concerns were effectively addressed that also included patient consent in the data exchange process. Thereby, the implemented toolset offered a collaborative environment to share EHRs by the healthcare providers.