Guiding interoperable electronic health records through patient-sharing networks
Author(s)
Clarke, JM
Warren, LR
Arora, S
Barahona, M
Darzi, AW
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Effective sharing of clinical information between care providers is a critical component of a safe, efficient health system. National data-sharing systems may be costly, politically contentious and do not reflect local patterns of care delivery. This study examines hospital attendances in England from 2013 to 2015 to identify instances of patient sharing between hospitals. Of 19.6 million patients receiving care from 155 hospital care providers, 130 million presentations were identified. On 14.7 million occasions (12%), patients attended a different hospital to the one they attended on their previous interaction. A network of hospitals was constructed based on the frequency of patient sharing between hospitals which was partitioned using the Louvain algorithm into ten distinct data-sharing communities, improving the continuity of data sharing in such instances from 0 to 65–95%. Locally implemented data-sharing communities of hospitals may achieve effective accessibility of clinical information without a large-scale national interoperable information system.
Date Issued
2018-12-10
Date Acceptance
2018-11-09
ISSN
2398-6352
Publisher
Nature Research (part of Springer Nature)
Journal / Book Title
npj Digital Medicine
Volume
1
Issue
1
Replaces
10044/1/65340
Copyright Statement
© 2018 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Sponsor
The Peter Sowerby Charitable Foundation
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust- BRC Funding
National Institute for Health Research
Grant Number
N/A
EP/N014529/1
RDB04
n/a
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Health Care Sciences & Services
CARE
HOSPITALS
CHALLENGES
PHYSICIANS
PROGRESS
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
65
Date Publish Online
2018-12-10