Components of a National Health Information Infrastructure

CHAPTER SUMMARY

A comprehensive approach to patient safety requires the ability to anticipate and protect against circumstances that might lead to adverse events and implement corrective actions. Both adverse events and near misses require standard collection/reporting processes, datasets, definitions, and analytic approaches that can be achieved only by integrating patient safety reporting systems into the context of health information systems in both large institutions and office practices. These systems employ multiple detection methods and multiple reporting channels and involve a broad array of data elements. Establishing a national health information infrastructure is necessary to provide the backbone for such systems.

This chapter is divided into three sections: the first provides a general overview of the national health information infrastructure and a conceptual model of standards-based integrated data systems to support patient safety in institutional and office practice settings for all audiences; the second presents a technical review of the informatics components that support an information infrastructure for the technical reader; and the third provides a discussion of how standards-based clinical systems can be and have been implemented to support this endeavor for both audiences.