International standards for building Electronic Health Record (EHR)

The recent progress of ICT (Information Communication Technology) applications in health of our citizens and healthcare make it possible to establish individual EHR within foreseeable time. The goal of EHR is enabling to connect person and health care organizations at point of care. The use of EHR coupled with clinical decision support system in healthcare practice will provide tools for healthcare organizations to achieve errorless, safe, cost effective and quality care. The consumer focused healthcare is increasingly emphasized and it requires an individual's integrated lifetime health and healthcare database (EHR) in real time from all sites. The integration of clinical data needs interoperable data with national infrastructure that allows the integration of data, access control with data privacy and system security. In order to build an interoperable EHR, it requires standardized regional collection of individuals' health and care data/information. This standardized approach requires data structure, message development, communication, architecture, clinical documents, semantic content, security and business requirements, etc. This paper will address relevant definitions of EHR and activities of International Standards Developing Organizations (SDO) with available standards.