I like to think of Enterprise Architecture as a blueprint for the health information system. You wouldn’t build your house without a blueprint, and you shouldn’t build your HIS without one either. I must confess that I find some of the language around EA to be opaque. I took and would recommend a course on The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) which really helped me to understand EA better.
To me, “Enterprise” just means that it’s holistic, you are talking about all the health information systems and data and the vision is big enough to accommodate the scale you want to achieve, i.e. the whole country with room to grow.
“Architecture” just means how it is put together. So the “Enterprise Architecture” is the blueprint, or plan, for putting together the health information system that considers how the data are generated (the business processes), where it needs to end up, who the users are and their data needs, and how it all should fit together rationally. It should maximize efficiency and accommodate growth (scale-ability).
Dave
