How can sharing clinical information be made to work?

There is a recognised need to share clinical information in order to improve integrity, continuity, safety and speed of delivering patient care. This remains a serious weakness in the conceptualisation of existing health information management systems. The evolution of structured (e.g., HL7) messaging standards has been driven largely from an administrative information viewpoint, as have many of the initiatives driving the development of electronic patient record (EPR) systems. Neither appears to address crucial needs for clinical data exchanges often across wide areas to meet the needs of best quality, cost-effective and low risk patient care delivery. The present reality is that clinical messaging is complex, rigid and ineffective, and the business case for its users is not compelling. Administrative and financial arrangements need to be developed which support the more widespread use of clinical data exchanges. This paper underlines the importance of web technology as a key element in the communications strategy and as an adjunct (or alternative) to more structured messaging environments. It also raises some of the fundamental structural problems, which impact the use of messaging in healthcare, and puts forward proposals as to how these may best be addressed and resolved.