Implementing the lifelong personal health record in a regionalised health information system: the case of Lombardy, Italy.

Background: The use of personal health records (PHRs) can help people make better health decisions and improves the quality of care by allowing access to and use of the information needed to communicate effectively with others concerning their health care.

Objective: This work presents the lifelong PHR system of the Lombardy region as an example of the implementation of an e-health solution that is capable of providing personal clinical documents from a lifelong perspective, integrating different healthcare providers over a large territory.

Methods: The lifelong PHR is embedded in the regional healthcare information system of Lombardy, which is characterised by a large and heterogeneous territory, a large number of different healthcare providers and organisations, and a significant population.

Implementing standards for the interoperability among healthcare providers in the public regionalized Healthcare Information System of the Lombardy Region.

Information technologies (ITs) have now entered the everyday workflow in a variety of healthcare providers with a certain degree of independence. This independence may be the cause of difficulty in interoperability between information systems and it can be overcome through the implementation and adoption of standards. Here we present the case of the Lombardy Region, in Italy, that has been able, in the last 10 years, to set up the Regional Social and Healthcare Information System, connecting all the healthcare providers within the region, and providing full access to clinical and health-related documents independently from the healthcare organization that generated the document itself.