Development of a gateway for interoperability in community-based care: An empirical study

Background Information and communications technology has attracted attention as a useful way of sharing care records in community-based care. Such information sharing systems, however, imposed the burden of inputting the same records into different information systems due to a lack of interoperability of the systems. Objectives The purpose of this study was to develop a gateway that links information systems and to investigate the functionality and usability of the gateway through an empirical study. Methods We developed a gateway with healthcare and welfare professionals in Kashiwa city, Japan. The gateway system consisted of two sub-systems: a data exchange sub-system and a common sub-system. Regarding the security, we used the transport layer security 1.2 and a public key infrastructure. For document formats, we utilized the health level seven international, extensible markup language, and portable document format. In addition, we performed an empirical study with 11 scenarios of four simulated patients and a questionnaire survey to the professionals. Results Professionals of eight occupations participated the empirical study and verified the gateway to link information systems of six vendors. For a questionnaire survey, 32 professionals out of 40 reported that the gateway would eliminate the burden of inputting the same records into different information systems.