Abstract
Medical information systems should manage information about both patient and medical resource to provide efficient medical service to patients. Clinical pathways allow sharing of patient information within a medical agency, which improve efficiency for medical service. Regional clinical pathways, that are extensions of clinical pathways, allow sharing of patient information among regional medical agencies. However, information sharing about medical resource is limited in some areas in Japan. These information sharing systems tend to be developed bottom-up in Japan. We introduce Patient Flow Systems, an integrated medical information system that is developed and operated top-down in New South Wales, Australia, and compare these approaches. Finally we propose top-down development of medical information systems for more efficient medical service.
