Federated EHR: How to improve data quality maintaining privacy

Designing information integration solutions for healthcare in development countries is particularly complex due both to technical and organizational constraints. Classical data integration solutions based on a central database or data warehouse are not easily adaptable to this sparse environment with high number of autonomous data sources and no central controller. In such a distributed and loosely connected environment, privacy and data quality become particularly challenging as it is neither possible to control how data is used nor to measure its level of quality. In this paper we provide a lightweight solution to share healthcare data in a distributed and poorly connected environment to better coordinate healthcare services, minimize human errors, accelerate operative procedures and improve visibility of distributed healthcare processes to the governing bodies. This paper presents the architectural and theoretical framework to deal with privacy and data quality in an EHR (Electronic Health Records). The proposed solution derives from the lessons learned from e-health projects developed in Mozambique and in Italy.