Integrating hospital information systems: a bottom-up approach

The growing complexity of hospital information systems has prompted information systems managers to seek applicable solutions for integrating their systems. While many successful applications of information systems have been introduced and implemented in the hospital environment, the integration of heterogeneous applications in existing, multi-vendor, computing environments into a cohesive hospital-wide information system has proved to be complicated and difficult to accomplish. This paper discusses systems integration in hospitals and presents a conceptual framework for bottom-up integration of hospital information systems. The scope of the proposed framework is the integration of stand-alone clinical, administrative and financial information elements of a hospital into a unified system environment with a central medical data warehouse.