A Review of Cross Organizational Healthcare Data Sharing

Abstract

Increasingly, healthcare is provided by a team of care providers from different organizations. Cross-organizational healthcare data sharing is a major issue in interoperable healthcare organizations. Studies have shown that quality of care can be put at risk when patients are transferred from one organization to another, while the need for protecting patient privacy is sometimes an inhibitor to providing information computing technology (ICT) solutions. This paper presents a systematic literature review of crossorganizational healthcare data sharing. The review includes research related to laws and regulations as well as proposed methodological and ICT solutions. Our methodology for querying, filtering and selecting relevant papers from scientific, academic and general repositories is explained and the selected papers are categorized and compared in terms of scope, contributions, and future directions. Based on this analysis, we outline a possible research direction for developing ICT solutions that healthcare providers and regulators would be willing to adopt. Based on our review, we concluded that inspite of the liberal regulations around data sharing among authorized healthcare providers, these organizations are utterly reluctant to collaborate on patient information. Fear of a breech of personal health information, and the shortage of technological facilitators that are compatible with the existing health information systems, are the main causes of the cross-organizational interoperability problems in the healthcare sector. The existing collaborative technologies require considerable initial investments that the current healthcare system is not willing to spend funds on.