9,370 research outputs found
Adding HL7 version 3 data types to PostgreSQL
The HL7 standard is widely used to exchange medical information
electronically. As a part of the standard, HL7 defines scalar communication
data types like physical quantity, point in time and concept descriptor but
also complex types such as interval types, collection types and probabilistic
types. Typical HL7 applications will store their communications in a database,
resulting in a translation from HL7 concepts and types into database types.
Since the data types were not designed to be implemented in a relational
database server, this transition is cumbersome and fraught with programmer
error. The purpose of this paper is two fold. First we analyze the HL7 version
3 data type definitions and define a number of conditions that must be met, for
the data type to be suitable for implementation in a relational database. As a
result of this analysis we describe a number of possible improvements in the
HL7 specification. Second we describe an implementation in the PostgreSQL
database server and show that the database server can effectively execute
scientific calculations with units of measure, supports a large number of
operations on time points and intervals, and can perform operations that are
akin to a medical terminology server. Experiments on synthetic data show that
the user defined types perform better than an implementation that uses only
standard data types from the database server.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 6 table
What do identifiers in HL7 identify? An essay in the ontology of identity
Health Level 7 (HL7) is an organization seeking to provide universal standards for the exchange of healthcare information. In a document entitled ‘HL7 Version 3
Standard: Data Types’, the HL7 organization advances descriptions of data types recom- mended for use as identifiers. We will argue that the descriptions supplied provide insufficient guidance as to what exactly the entities are which these data types uniquely identify. Are they real things, such as persons or pieces of equipment? Or are they representations of such real things in information artifacts? We here outline the problems faced by HL7 in providing answers to such questions, problems which arise because of the lack of anything like a coherent ontology in the HL7 standard, and we make some recommendations for future improvements
A methodological proposal and tool support for the HL7 standards compliance in the development of health information systems
Health information systems are increasingly complex, and their development is presented as a challenge for software development companies offering quality, maintainable and interoperable products. HL7 (Health level 7) International, an international non-profit organization, defines and maintains standards related to health information systems. However, the modelling languages proposed by HL7 are far removed from standard languages and widely known by software engineers. In these lines, NDT is a software development methodology that has a support tool called NDT-Suite and is based, on the one hand, on the paradigm of model-driven engineering and, on the other hand, in UML that is a widely recognized standard language. This paper proposes an extension of the NDT methodology called MoDHE (Model Driven Health Engineering) to offer software engineers a methodology capable of modelling health information systems conforming to HL7 using UML domain models
Working with the HL7 metamodel in a Model Driven Engineering context
HL7 (Health Level 7) International is an organization that defines health information standards. Most HL7
domain information models have been designed according to a proprietary graphic language whose
domain models are based on the HL7 metamodel. Many researchers have considered using HL7 in the
MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) context. A limitation has been identified: all MDE tools support UML
(Unified Modeling Language), which is a standard model language, but most do not support the HL7 proprietary
model language. We want to support software engineers without HL7 experience, thus realworld
problems would be modeled by them by defining system requirements in UML that are compliant
with HL7 domain models transparently. The objective of the present research is to connect HL7 with software
analysis using a generic model-based approach. This paper introduces a first approach to an HL7
MDE solution that considers the MIF (Model Interchange Format) metamodel proposed by HL7 by making
use of a plug-in developed in the EA (Enterprise Architect) tool.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RInstituto de Salud Carlos III PI12/01571Instituto de Salud Carlos III PT13/0006/003
Foundation for the Electronic Health Record: An ontological analysis of the HL7 Reference Information Model
Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have
increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task remains of ensuring that the right sorts of information reach the right sorts of people. In what follows we defend the thesis that efforts to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations, and that the communication of healthcare information and knowledge needs to rest on a sound ontology of social interaction. We illustrate this thesis in relation to the HL7 RIM, which is one centrally important tool for communication in the healthcare domain
Report on the EHCR (Deliverable 26.2)
This deliverable is the second for Workpackage 26. The first, submitted after
Month 12, summarised the areas of research that the partners had identified as
being relevant to the semantic indexing of the EHR. This second one reports
progress on the key threads of work identified by the partners during the project to
contribute towards semantically interoperable and processable EHRs.
This report provides a set of short summaries on key topics that have emerged as
important, and to which the partners are able to make strong contributions. Some of
these are also being extended via two new EU Framework 6 proposals that include
WP26 partners: this is also a measure of the success of this Network of Excellence
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