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Ecosystem of electronic health record databases in Venezuela

Abstract:

The Venezuelan Health System consists nowadays of a variety of loosely coupled organizations that share a common goal: the health of Venezuelans. These organizations use a variety of different health record formats, in most cases incompatible with each other. This situation makes it difficult to properly care for patients when they move from one health center to another. Such diversity complicates decision-making processes related to public health policies and research. In order to address this problem, we propose an electronic health record system centralized at the national level, where a copy of each patient’s medical history is kept. This would allow the health institutions to retain their own local health record systems within what we call an “ecosystem” of EHR databases.