National E- Health Strategy

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Datacenters and Telecommunications

The data center(s) and telecommunications to support all hospitals, PHC’s and Ministry offices and systems, are essential components of Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, containing server, storage, and operational management capabilities and security and privacy protocols necessary to support MOH mission critical business systems. These are all absolutely essential to enabling eHealth, and must be implemented with a high degree of reliability, security and performance.

The IT principles to guide decision making at data centre sites and facilities include:

A network of high availability datacenters will be established supporting all MOH points of service in the Kingdom, and will be phased in over a period of years, as the eHealth strategy is implemented.

These datacenters will be connected through a secure, high performance telecommunications network connecting the datacenters to all hospitals, PHC’s labs, specialized clinics, and all MOH offices. Eventually secure connections will also be made to pharmacies, ambulances, other non-MOH health facilities (such as National Guard Health Affairs), and private clinics, hospitals and pharmacies for the purpose of sharing clinical data.

Although the benefits of sharing patient clinical data are important, there will be tight security, and only authorized physicians and other providers will be able to access patient records, on a need to know basis. Restrictions that can be chosen by individual patients to protect their sensitive data will also be available.