Health Information Exchange and its Barriers and Facilitators in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Key Healthcare Stakeholders’ Perceptions from Pakistan

Reliable and timely health information is useful in making important health decision by providers and policy makers to enhance the healthcare quality of individual patients and the whole population. We describe an ongoing qualitative work to explore the deployment strategies for Health Information Exchange (HIE) in Pakistan. The preliminary findings from the analysis of the first 15 interviews presented an overview of evolved categories such as difficulties of using paper-based information systems, barriers and facilitators to HIE, advantages and disadvantages of HIE and the existence of fragmented HIE in Pakistan. Stakeholders found HIE a useful intervention to manage and analyse health data for better decision making and improved health outcomes.