...
What these situations have in common is that when systems interoperate, one typically behaves as a ?a Master Patient Index, allowing others to query it to find patient records.
At the MEDINFO 2010 conference, we demonstrated the potential for interoperability between OpenMRS and OpenELIS (an open-source Laboratory Information System). We wanted to describe and show a scenario where OpenMRS would be providing the master patient index and OpenELIS would be able to access patient demographic information from the OpenMRS database to avoid the necessity for dual data entry of that information into both systems. As the framework for this interoperability, we decided to implement the standards developed by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative. We successfully created a working demonstration of the concept, but more work is needed to make this interoperability link suitable for production use.
...