Reply To: Week 1 Topic 2 Why do we need EA?

[Dr.Watcharee Arunsodsai]

An enterprise architecture is needed to be planned by the decision- maker level, all stake holders and builders. These require a large sum of budget and time consuming. In public health hospitals, there are already implemented health information systems which can be sharing to the ministry while can not be linked to each other. It seemed to be one-way communication and redundancy of data because lack of interoperability. As the medical practitioner, we are only the operational level whom will be burnout by the data entry workload but we still need the patient medical records sharing from the other hospitals. We need EA to help not only our practice (available underlying health and diseases) but also governmental health system (utilizing of universal coverage and civil servant medical benefit scheme). Individual hospitals may care about their own information systems and may not feel confident with the others. The other obstacles are the patients themselves whom seek not just only duplicate services in private and public hospitals but also self treatment by over counter medicines. This might not be included in the reliable health informations. So the EA is needed to be set up by carefully balancing of business view and information technology view and served the patient’s privacy and appropriate defined stakeholders. We don’t have HITECH Act but we have only Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Then we must ensure the confidentiality of the health information about individuals is not compromised while we plan for the EA.