Systems integration in healthcare industry: A case study of one healthcare records management company

A common challenge in designing and implementing information retrieval systems in the healthcare industry is the integration of systems supplied by different vendors. Vendors usually produce closed systems (systems without any electronic interfaces to share information with other systems) and this hinders free sharing of information among different medical systems. Integrated health information systems that link the data from hospitals, health plan providers, and regulators would not only improve efficiency, but also would save money. Medical records that are digitally stored in servers need to be accessible from different applications. If products of different vendors were to communicate better and share medical data, it would significantly improve usefulness of information technology applications in healthcare industry. The purpose of this research is to explore system integration issues through a case study of Vegatip (Vegatip is an alias to protect the identity of the real company), a records management company that serves the healthcare industry. This research will identify the problems faced while attempting to integrate Vegatip's servers that hold digitized images with the medical practice management systems that the hospitals and physicians' offices use. The research will define practice management systems and describe available commercial systems, will describe issues related to systems integration, and will describe the procedure used to recommend an integration method to connect a given practice management system to the server. Limitations associated with various options of systems integration will also be discussed