Networkcentric healthcare: Outline of entry portal concept

Presently global healthcare is being hampered by information chaos which in turn leads to inferior decision making, ineffective and inefficient operations, exponentially increasing costs and even loss of life. To alleviate this predicament the merits of adopting and adapting the doctrine of network centric operations to healthcare has been recommended [1]. Critical to this approach is the ability to continuously extract and analyse high quality information from the environment or ¿operational space¿ in order to support rapid decision making. This can only be attained through the effective use of IC2T (Information/Computer/ Communications Technology). Thus, making the network, or world healthcare information grid (WHIG); a system of interconnecting technology grids, the backbone of healthcare network centric operations (HNCO). Although the required technology and individual components of WHIG exist, attention needs to be paid to the design of this network, with particular consideration given to its key features including the entry point and functional capabilities as discussed in the following.