Healthcare Information Exchange in Regional eHealth Networks Implications for Initiatives in Advancing Shared Care

Healthcare information exchange (HIE) has been refined from point-to-point messaging to wide-area networks integrating multiple service providers. Presently, federated information systems connect more than 25 hospitals with 60 municipal health centres in three Finnish hospital districts. The usability and benefits of these regional eHealth networks (RHIN) were studied in a subset of 10.000 end-users from secondary and primary care in these hospital districts. The usability of several functions was assessed by on-line survey in 72 physicians and the benefits by interviewing 30 health care professionals after subsequent operational use of RHIN in patient care. Although the survey revealed physician dissatisfaction with several key functions of usability, user experiences indicated that 85 % of the doctors and nurses found HIE with RHIN to have a beneficial effect on patient care. This information may be applied when reshaping the human context of shared care and migrating RHIN to upgraded national eHealth network.