PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jonathan M Clarke
AU  - Leigh R Warren
AU  - Sonal Arora
AU  - Mauricio Barahona
AU  - Ara W Darzi
TI  - Guiding Interoperable Electronic Health Records Through Patient Sharing Networks
AID  - 10.1101/473272
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 473272
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/19/473272.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/19/473272.full
AB  - Effective sharing of clinical information between care providers is a critical component of a safe, efficient health system. National data sharing systems may be costly, politically contentious and do not reflect local patterns of care delivery. This study examines hospital attendances in England from 2013 to 2015 to identify instances of patient sharing between hospitals. Of 19.6 million patients receiving care from 155 hospital care provider, 130 million presentations were identified. On 14.7 million occasions (12%), patients attended a different hospital to the one they attended on their previous interaction. A network of hospitals was constructed based on the frequency of patient sharing between hospitals which was partitioned using the Louvain algorithm into 10 distinct data-sharing communities, improving the continuity of data sharing in such instances from 0% to 65-95%. Locally implemented data-sharing communities of hospitals may achieve effective accessibility of clinical information without a large-scale national interoperable information system.