Sharing patient medical information among healthcare team members while sustaining information security

1. Introduction The delivery of healthcare for many diseases has been shifting towards a patient-centric approach where care provision is tailored to meet individual patient’s needs. This leads to diseases being treated by multidisciplinary teams of healthcare professionals who work in a collaborative environment and are formed and evolved based on the patient’s changing medical condition. This environment demands the availability of the right information to the right person at the right point in the treatment, which means patient medical information needs to be shared across the organization-secured boundaries. In other words, at the point of treatment, healthcare professionals need to be able to remotely access different relevant patient medical information generated by other professionals and kept in their independent Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). Legacy HIS are ill equipped to meet the new emerging requirements of the patient-centric treatment approach. Although they keep in-house patient medical information protected and controlled, they do not support the ability to sustain the locally applied protection whilst sharing it outside the secured boundary, and thus lose control over the information as soon as it leaves the HIS. This research, in general, aims to facilitate information sharing among healthcare team members and, at the same time, sustain the security of the information as defined by the information owner. 2. Methods This poster demonstrates the initial stages of the research, which looks at patient treatment in the healthcare domain, in order to understand: how healthcare professional team members communicate; how HIS are used by the care team in patient treatment; how patient medical information is generated and stored; and how it can be used to support the treatment. This was achieved using conceptual modelling of a selected medical scenario (Breast Cancer in Wales, UK). This investigation of a real-life scenario has identified the anticipated treatment steps and, at each step, the flow of patient medical information, healthcare team members involved, and the HIS which stores the information. 3. Results The results have shown that there is a large number of professionals (about 13) involved in the treatment of patients with Breast Cancer in Wales. Each professional plays a defined role and collectively the team offers co-ordinated care. Additionally, these professionals use at least seven different HIS in order to access the patient information and each stores sensitive patient information in medical records. Although each HIS follows national guidelines, they adapt the guidelines and policies to meet local needs and circumstances. However, there are inter-professional communication issues among the team members that inhibit decision-making using the information, as well as communication problems between the team and the patient, which prevents the required effective treatment. In addition, the HIS are ill-equipped to support the team. 4.Conclusions We will use this information to identify how to improve HIS support for members of a multidisciplinary team in the future. In addition, the emerging security requirements of the new systems will be outlined in order to facilitate and support collaboration among team members and guarantee persistent control over shared patient medical information