A National Medical Information System for Senegal: Architecture and Services.

ABSTRACT

In Senegal, great amounts of data are daily generated by medical activities such as consultation, hospitalization, blood test, x-ray, birth, death, etc. These data are still recorded in register, printed images, audios and movies which are manually processed. However, some medical organizations have their own software for non-standardized patient record management, appointment, wages, etc. without any possibility of sharing these data or communicating with other medical structures. This leads to lots of limitations in reusing or sharing these data because of their possible structural and semantic heterogeneity. To overcome these problems we have proposed a National Medical Information System for Senegal (SIMENS). As an integrated platform, SIMENS provides an EHR system that supports healthcare activities, a mobile version and a web portal. The SIMENS architecture proposes also a data and application integration services for supporting interoperability and decision making.