Slovenia’s Institute of Public Health is modelling new eHealth services. For its new Arthroplasty Registry, unveiled in November, it used the OpenEHR standard to design interoperable electronic patient records.
The registry for this type of orthopaedi surgical procedure collects, analyses, and disseminates the data and information on patients, and should improve the information exchanged between medical practitioners and organisations. Slovenia’s Arthroplasty Registry is one of the outcomes of Parent/Patient Registries, an EU-funded project to build and test cross-border patient registries.
“The arthroplasty registry increases the quality of orthopaedic healthcare”, explains Ziva Rant, a researcher at Slovenia’s National Institute of Public Health. A report on the registry was published on the Parent project’s website.
To build the data model, the researchers used OpenEHR - publicly developed specifications for health information systems and building clinical models. The tool is user-friendly for both medical experts and IT specialists, says Rant. “OpenEHR helps both groups to understand one another, improving collaboration.”
The model was developed with the Valdoltra Orthopaedic Hospital in Ankaran. According to Rant, OpenEHR is also used by the Division of Paediatrics at the Ljubljana University Medical Centre.
More information:
OpenEHR news item
National Institute of Public Health announcement of Parent/Patient Registries
Comments
In addition, Slovenia is also using OpenEHR as the basis towards interoperability on national eHealth projects, showing that IHE and OpenEHR are complementary!