The legal aspect of interoperability of cross border electronic health services: A study of the european and national legal framework.

Legal interoperability constitutes a prerequisite for the provision of high-quality cross border e-health services, like ePrescription and ePatientSummary. A review of EU legislation, policy initiatives and relevant judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) was held, concerning personal medical data. Four European social welfare systems, according to Esping - Andersen's typology, were selected and a study of health policy in relation to the national legal framework regarding the data protection regulation is examined. A model of legal interoperability for cross-border eHealth services is proposed for policy makers at EU level based on the following major domains: protection and security of data, transparency and liability, further analyzed in multiple axes and combined with EU targets, policy priorities and basic European legal principles. This model could be viable because of the EU's transnational existence, the coexistence of national and Community law, and the need of novel models of political governance under a unified regulatory and normative base.

A methodology for reliability analysis in health networks.

A reliability model for a health care domain based on requirement analysis at the early stage of design of regional health network (RHN) is introduced. RHNs are considered as systems supporting the services provided by health units, hospitals, and the regional authority. Reliability assessment in health care domain constitutes a field-of-quality assessment for RHN. A novel approach for predicting system reliability in the early stage of designing RHN systems is presented in this paper. The uppermost scope is to identify the critical processes of an RHN system prior to its implementation. In the methodology, Unified Modeling Language activity diagrams are used to identify megaprocesses at regional level and the customer behavior model graph (CBMG) to describe the states transitions of the processes. CBMG is annotated with: 1) the reliability of each component state and 2) the transition probabilities between states within the scope of the life cycle of the process. A stochastic reliability model (Markov model) is applied to predict the reliability of the business process as well as to identify the critical states and compare them with other processes to reveal the most critical ones. The ultimate benefit of the applied methodology is the design of more reliable components in an RHN system. The innovation of the approach of reliability modeling lies with the analysis of severity classes of failures and the application of stochastic modeling using discrete-time Markov chain in RHNs.

Cross-border collaboration between Greece and FYROM: mobile healthcare provision.

Introduction of eHealth tools and applications denotes the new era in health care sector and especially in health care networks. The telemedicine applications in cross-border areas, referred as a Cross-Border Health network, serve the improvement of the quality of life for the population in cross-border areas. In this work a framework for such a network concerning the collaboration between Greece and FYROM is described. The network is in the first phase of design and is expected to be implemented within the next year. The requirements, the restrictions and the design of the network has been defined by the healthcare professionals and it staff that participate in the project. The results, so far, reveal the acceptance of the system from the staff of the healthcare organizations, while detailed results for the performance of the system will be available in the first quarter of the next year. The work denotes the successful efforts for the development of Cross-border Health Networks.

Reliability assessment of home health care services.

In this paper, a model of reliability assessment of services in Home Health Care Delivery is presented. Reliability is an important quality dimension for services and is included in non-functional requirements of a system. A stochastic Markov model for reliability assessment is applied to patient communication services, in the field of home health care delivery. The methodology includes the specification of scenarios, the definition of failures in scenarios as well as the application of the analytical model. The results of the methodology reveal the critical states of the Home Health Care System and recommendations for improvement of the services are proposed. The model gives valuable results in predicting service reliability and, independently of the error types, it can be applied to all fields of Regional Health Network (RHN).

Establishing a regional contact & service centre for public health care: the case in central macedonia, Greece.

Regional Healthcare System Authorities (RHSAs) run under the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Greece, aim is to improve the level of quality that health care organizations offer as well as to control the expenditure of health care services provided by the health care organizations. In this article we present the considerations taken during the establishment of the first Regional Contact & Service Center for Public Health in Greece in two of the RHSAs. In this respect, the current piece of work provides an up-to-date experience in establishing and setting the RCSC in its organizational context, an outline of its conceptual model and design, an outlook of the first quarterly results of its use, and a discussion of its potential impact.

Information system interoperability in a regional health care system infrastructure: a pilot study using health care information standards.

The 1st and 2nd Regional Health Care System Authority of Central Macedonia (1st and 2nd PeSY) are two of the seventeen Regional Healthcare System Authorities in Greece. Every single PeSY aims to improve the level of quality that health care organisations offer as well as to control the expenditure of health care services provided by the health care organisations, Hospitals and Primary Care Health units. There is currently an urgent need for Regional Health Authorities to deploy integrated healthcare information system, based on secure networks. The limited interoperability of current hospital information systems (HIS) poses a risk for the management of patient related information since there is a difficulty to transform processed data into useful information and knowledge. Thus, a pilot system was developed to achieve data integration record synchronisation using the Health Level 7 protocol between the existing HIS of two Hospitals of Thessaloniki and the central Offices of the PeSY. The pilot was funded by the Third Community Support Framework (jointly funded by EU and Greece) funds in order to prepare the forthcoming major healthcare IT projects in Greece. It is shown that such a system is pragmatic, achieves data integration and provides acceptable integration costs.