Features and Services of Welldesigned Hospital Information Systems: A Review Study

Context: Hospitals are large information organizations with the main goal of providing high-quality, integrated, and cost-effective healthcare. This goal is more easily realized through well-designed Hospital Information Systems [HIS]. Evidence Acquisition: In this narrative review study, 98 articles were extracted from Science Direct, PubMed, and Google Scholar databases using Hospital Information System keyword. The articles were published between 1980 and 2018. After examining the quality of the articles in terms of research design and references, 41 articles remained for analysis. Relevant e-books and print books were also examined, and the features and services of HIS were investigated. Results: For HIS, seven features, namely the coverage of different types of data, integration of subsystems, having an enterprise metamodel, communication with other information systems, coverage of hospital units, adherence to standards, and connectivity to digital instruments were obtained. Moreover, 18 services of patient management, economic management and cost reduction, legal management of data, treatment management, administrative management, presenting information based on policies, clinical decision support, managerial-administrative decision support, educational support, research support, electronic medical record generation, text mining, encoding, documentation quality improvement, medical support, resource utilization management, personnel management, and warehouse management were determined. Conclusions: To evaluate HIS, it is necessary to determine its features and services. Based on the features and services of HIS, its evaluation tool has been developed in this study.