PPEPR: Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records

The integration of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems is at the centre of many of the new regional and national initiatives to integrate clinical processes across department, region, and national levels. Web Service technologies offer significant solutions to provide an interoperable communication infrastructure but are unable to support precise definitions for healthcare messages, functionality, and standards, required for making meaningful integration. The lack of interoperability within healthcare standards adds complexity to the initiatives. This heterogeneity exists within two versions of same standard (e.g. HL7), and also between standards (e.g. HL7, openEHR, CEN TC/251 13606). We therefore introduce an integration platform PPEPR (Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records), which is based on the principles of a semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (sSOA). PPEPR solves the problem of interoperability at the semantic level. A key focus of PPEPR is that once a patient information is captured, should be available for use across all potential care processes.