Health information systems challenges: the Heidelberg conference and the future

To present a summary of the state of the art in Health Information Systems (HIS), as discussed during the Heidelberg HIS Working Group Conference, and to examine possible strategies for continuous improvement of the field.

The state of the art in HIS is briefly described, and the historical trends are examined that emerge from a review of the previous HIS Working Group conferences. To extrapolate from those trends and suggest possible new directions, we consider whether perceived difficulties in the diffusion of HIS systems are simply a product of technological factors, or whether fundamental social factors have been ignored.

The experience with HIS environments is 'reasonably good' but not excellent, and true HIS success stories are not common. One of the apparent difficulties is that the typical HIS does not regard communication among clinical users as its core mission, even though repeated studies of information needs and practice patterns show that communication is the leading cost in today's health care environment. It is suggested that progress in the HIS arena will benefit from increased emphasis on the social aspects of health care, and better integration of diverse data to promote the organizational communication and workflow. Improvements could also come from a change to a highly participatory and evolutionary software engineering process, focusing on communication behavior and co-operative work practices.

Future HIS development should view provider-provider and provider-patient communication as a core function, and incorporate features such as seamless support and tracking of communication, automatic gathering and presentation of data from multiple sources, data collection in atomic units by the most qualified provider, and integrated management, resource utilization, and tracking. The steps towards HIS that support these features might be smaller than generally suspected, once the appropriate changes in the reference point have been made.