Abstract
Instant access to individuals, health information is influential for the health promotion throughout the community
in both personal and public domains. Patients’ lives endanger due to lack of timely access to their
own health information and subsequently lead to adverse events. Patients’ health information fragmented
due to either geographical distribution of healthcare organizations or lack of integrated information
systems. Todays, Health information exchange systems facilitate data sharing among healthcare
entities and improve health management through the community. This study was conducted in 2014,
searching the literature using the term of “Health Information Exchange” in technical databases, including
PubMed-MEDLINE and Springer during 2004-2014. Totally, 9 out of 52 retrieved articles were omitted as
redundancy in both databases and irrelevancy. After that, the relevant abstracts were reviewed and their full
texts were extracted. Additionally, Google search engine and especially scholar section were searched
to obtain related literature, including library resources of Health Information and Management Systems
Society. This review was aimed at explaining the essentials of health information exchange including the
history, architectural strategies, common technical models and the advantages of being the use of Health
Information Exchange systems. Moreover, the barriers to the implementation of such systems were discussed
.