Data Integration in Health Care

Health data integration is considered a key component and, in some cases, a pre-requisite in nearly every systematic attempt to achieve integrated care. In the context of health care, data integration is a complex process of combining multiple types of data from different sources into a single infrastructure, allowing multiple levels of users to access, edit, and contribute to an electronic record of health services (EHRs). In the following chapter we describe six basic types of data integration, the pathways by which data integration facilitates integrated care, the main players of health care data integration, and key challenges to integrating data.