Health care team's view of the patient has become fragmented into disconnected facts and clusters of information and is distributed amongst a broad assortment of healthcare personnel with specific, limited interactions with an individual patient and differing vantage points into their health.
Health information systems, like healthcare personnel, also operate independent from one another. The result is disaggregated information stored in different locations and formats, making it impossible for data to be harmonized, and for healthcare personnel to share knowledge, collaborate in care, and truly understand the full breadth of an individual’s health history. As the problem of incongruent health information architecture unfolded, global health practitioners that focused upon health systems strengthening activities increasingly recognized the importance of harmonizing health information systems.
OpenHIE operates according to principles of openness, transparency and sharing of ideas, software and strategies for deployment and use. Our approach is founded on the principle that those who use the health information must aid in the development of their information systems.
Refer to the OpenHIE Background for further details.