Standards to support information systems integration in anatomic pathology.

Context: Integrating anatomic pathology information- text and images-into electronic health care records is a key challenge for enhancing clinical information exchange between anatomic pathologists and clinicians. The aim of the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) international initiative is precisely to ensure interoperability of clinical information systems by using existing widespread industry standards such as Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) and Health Level Seven (HL7).

Objective: To define standard-based informatics transactions to integrate anatomic pathology information to the Healthcare Enterprise.

New advanced technologies to provide decentralised and secure access to medical records: case studies in oncology.

The main problem for health professionals and patients in accessing information is that this information is very often distributed over many medical records and locations. This problem is particularly acute in cancerology because patients may be treated for many years and undergo a variety of examinations. Recent advances in technology make it feasible to gain access to medical records anywhere and anytime, allowing the physician or the patient to gather information from an "ephemeral electronic patient record".

Integrating anatomical pathology to the healthcare enterprise.

For medical decisions, healthcare professionals need that all required information is both correct and easily available. We address the issue of integrating anatomical pathology department to the healthcare enterprise. The pathology workflow from order to report, including specimen process and image acquisition was modeled.

A peculiar aspect of patients' safety: the discriminating power of identifiers for record linkage.

Today, one of the main stake of the interfaced health information systems or networks is to be able to gather the different parts of the medical record of a patient without any risk to mix them with those of one other patient. This objective could appear easy to reach but only in theory because in practice many name are misspelled or erroneous and a great attention has to be paid to define what is the best identifier to link medical record. As a linkage using less informative identifiers could lead to linkage errors, it is essential to quantify the information associated to each identifier.

Which are the best identifiers for record linkage?

As a linkage using less informative identifiers could lead to linkage errors, it is essential to quantify the information associated to each identifier. The aim of this study was to estimate the discriminating power of different identifiers susceptible to be used in a record linkage process. This work showed the interest of three identifiers when linking data concerning a same patient using an automatic procedure based on the method proposed by Jaro; the date of birth, the first and the last names seemed to be the more appropriate identifiers.