Turkey's e-Health Activities A Country Case Study

health records in the form of minimum health data sets. The aim is to collect health data from
all healthcare institutions scattered over the country as in the case of pilot Family Medicine
Information Systems. This time, the nodes will be the Hospital Information Systems mostly.
The NHIS has a centralized architecture. The servers are residing in the Ministry of
Health premises in Ankara. Currently, the HL7 v3 messages are prepared by the consortium
and as the communication protocol, Web Services will be used. The test servers are currently
available for testing by the software companies, healthcare institutions and individuals.
Technical guidelines have prepared and the HL7 v3 messaging definitions are provided to the
interested parties as well. The software companies will have to comply with these standards
developed by the consortium and refereed by the Ministry of Health. In this way,
interoperability among NHIS servers and various Hospital/Lab/Clinic/etc. information
systems will be provided. The load tests of the centralized architecture have already been
completed thus no problem is expected with the incremental involvement of healthcare
institutions in the system.
The first action of the e-Transformation Turkey Short Term Action Plan which was
published in the Official Gazette in December 2003 was the development of the National
Information Society Strategy. After an intensive work co-ordinated by the State Planning
Organization the Information Society Strategy and the attached Action Plan approved by the
High Planning council dated 11/07/2006 by number 2006/38 has been take into force after
published in the Official Gazette dated 28/07/2006. 111 Actions took place in the Strategy. In
the action plan, 4 actions were taking place under the responsibility of Ministry of Health
were, Establishment of the Health Information System, Data Sharing between Blood Banks,
Online Health Services and Telemedicine Systems.
Turkey’s Telemedicine project proposes to compensate the lack of experts in imaging
area, to get the second opinion in complex cases, to increase the quality patient care and to
provide best diagnosis and cure for the patients. It is implemented in 18 Ministry of Health
Hospitals.
As known, there are many initiatives to introduce Electronic Health Records under the
umbrella of e-Health to serve the administrative and citizen needs. Ageing population,
changing expectations of patients, new health threats and increasing costs of healthcare
delivery are highlighted in various numbers of plans and programmes. Healthcare IT solutions
are now providing enormous benefits and especially e-Health’s supports to those problems are
widely proven. Terminology systems’ role is obvious to reach the ultimate goals of e-Health.
There needs to be a strong political will to reinforce the Information Processing
Departments in line with the Information Society Strategy needs and reorganize them by
enriching with the necessary multi-disciplinary human resources. It is especially important in
the health sector because of its complexity and coverage. Hopefully, an international effort
addressing this issue may help the countries to build capacity in the e-Health domain.
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