Challenges and Solutions for Designing and Managing pHealth Ecosystems

For improving quality and safety of healthcare as well as efficiency and efficacy of care processes, health systems turn toward personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine. The related pHealth ecosystem combines different domains represented by a huge variety of different human and non-human actors belonging to different policy domains, coming from different disciplines. Those actors deploy different methodologies, terminologies, and ontologies, offering different levels of knowledge, skills, and experiences, acting in different scenarios and accommodating different business cases to meet the intended business objectives. Core challenge is the formal representation and management of multiple domains' knowledge. For correctly modeling such systems and their behavior, a system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based, policy-driven approach is inevitable, thereby following established Good Modeling Best Practices. The ISO Interoperability Reference Architecture model and framework offers such approach. The paper describes and classifies the ongoing paradigm changes. It presents requirements and solutions for designing and implementing advanced pHealth ecosystems, thereby correctly adopting and integrating existing pHealth interoperability standards, specifications and projects

Modeling the Personal Health Ecosystem

Complex ecosystems like the pHealth one combine different domains represented by a huge variety of different actors (human beings, organizations, devices, applications, components) belonging to different policy domains, coming from different disciplines, deploying different methodologies, terminologies, and ontologies, offering different levels of knowledge, skills, and experiences, acting in different scenarios and accommodating different business cases to meet the intended business objectives. For correctly modeling such systems, a system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based, policy-driven approach is inevitable, thereby following established Good Modeling Best Practices. However, most of the existing standards, specifications and tools for describing, representing, implementing and managing health (information) systems reflect the advancement of information and communication technology (ICT) represented by different evolutionary levels of data modeling. The paper presents a methodology for integrating, adopting and advancing models, standards, specifications as well as implemented systems and components on the way towards the aforementioned ultimate approach, so meeting the challenge we face when transforming health systems towards ubiquitous, personalized, predictive, preventive, participative, and cognitive health and social care