An extranet architecture for inter-operability among healthcare systems

Most federations of healthcare systems have operated in an in-house environment where local area networks coupled with layers of interoperability were used to connect various information systems. More recently, a need has arisen to connect large institutions such as hospitals, with wider area applications such as general practice systems in order to create the complete patient record. In this paper we present a model and architecture, which addresses the problem of connecting all parties involved in patient healthcare.