Mapping Health Electronic Registries and Surveillance in Palestinian Ministry of Health Toward the National e-Health Strategy رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

Palestinian Ministry of Health built and developed many electronic applications and systems since its start in 1994 to capture administrative, financial, and health data for the sake of improving healthcare quality services presented to the Palestinian people. Availability and interoperability of such electronic systems would play a significant and primary role in providing healthcare services and therefore achieving good health outcomes. data sharing among such different electronic registries and systems is weak, and therefore the needed data by healthcare professionals and other stakeholders is not complete and not available at the right time and cannot rely on it for decision-making due to the lack of interoperability among these electronic systems since they have different data formats, in addition to challenges of privacy and security. This descriptive study mapped the current health electronic registries and surveillance systems in the Palestinian ministry of health toward the achievement of the National Ehealth Strategy that has the goal to govern these electronic health systems and gives the needed support for all governmental, and non-governmental institutions that intersect with health system at the national level. This research examined the literature and reviewed previous studies related to the subject by searching different search engines such as PubMed, Google Scholar and other websites available on the internet to enrich the research and attain its goals. This research proposed a data warehouse framework plan that has many layers, to make data available whenever requested by extracting it from different data sources in the ministry using Zinnar as an interoperability framework (ontology framework) that was developed by the Palestinian government to ensure data integrity and facilitate sharing VI between different ministries and institutions, the framework plan utilizes the Palestinian governmental network X-Road for securing the exchange of data. It also suggests an intermediate Application Programming Interface layer to facilitate interoperability and guarantee the needed format of the exchanged data. The usage of Extraction, Transformation, and Loading layer suggested by this proposed framework plan to ensure standardized data format, in addition to data dictionary and data marts to ease the utilization of the data warehouse by different stakeholders and to provide them with efficient access and analysis. Because of the complexity and the sensitivity of health data, this proposal advises the adoption of advanced machine learning and data mining tools to extract meaningful insights and ideas that would not be figured out by human or traditional analysis for better management and treatment. It also suggests the utilization of a Chatbot to provide intended users with a seamless access to relevant data when needed.