National healthcare information system in Croatian primary care: the foundation for improvement of quality and efficiency in patient care.

In order to improve the quality of patient care, while at the same time keeping up with the pace of increased needs of the population for healthcare services that directly impacts on the cost of care delivery processes, the Republic of Croatia, under the leadership of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, has formed a strategy and campaign for national public healthcare system reform. The strategy is very comprehensive and addresses all niches of care delivery processes; it is founded on the enterprise information systems that will aim to support end-to-end business processes in the healthcare domain. Two major requirements are in focus: (1) to provide efficient healthcare-related data management in support of decision-making processes; (2) to support a continuous process of healthcare resource spending optimisation. The first project is the Integrated Healthcare Information System (IHCIS) on the primary care level; this encompasses the integration of all primary point-of-care facilities and subjects with the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance and Croatian National Institute of Public Health. In years to come, IHCIS will serve as the main integration platform for connecting all other stakeholders and levels of health care (that is, hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories) into a single enterprise healthcare network. This article gives an overview of Croatian public healthcare system strategy aims and goals, and focuses on properties and characteristics of the primary care project implementation that started in 2003; it achieved a major milestone in early 2007 - the official grand opening of the project with 350 GPs already fully connected to the integrated healthcare information infrastructure based on the IHCIS solution.

Primary healthcare information system--development and deployment issues.

Croatian national primary healthcare ICT Implementation strategy is determined by Croatian national health strategy and plan, Croatian ICT development strategy for 21st century, and requirements specifications for the heath information system. National primary healthcare ICT implementation strategy components are accented: purpose of the ICT implementation strategy, information principles, need and ICT enablement in domains of patients, healthcare professionals, policy-makers and managers and public. Based on the determinants, three organizational levels have been established - government, ministerial and project levels. General architecture of Croatian primary healthcare information system and its implementation as well as national ICT environmental accelerations for national primary healthcare ICT environmental accelerators for health ICT implementations are presented.