Querying openEHR-based Electronic Health Record in the IHE XDS enviroment

This thesis presents the challenges related to adoption of electronic health record systems and use of standards to achieve functional and semantic interoperability. It focuses on the IHE XDS.b integration profile that enables interoperability of health information systems at the level of documentation handling. Semantic interoperability is presented from the aspect of structured data in exchanged documents establishing an openEHR based electronic health record system. Special attention is given to EHR search capabilities; IHE XDS.b search capabilities are limited to document metadata where content-based search is not supported. The key contribution of this work is a method for querying openEHR based Electronic Health Record in the IHE XDS environment. The conventional openEHR EHR System is extended to act as an IHE XDS Document Repository. Support for content-based queries is implemented through on-demand documents whose content is assembled using an AQL at the time of processing the retrieve request. The proposed method combines functional interoperability provided by the IHE integration profile XDS.b for the exchange of documents with semantic interoperability of openEHR based EHR system. The feasibility of the proposed method is presented on the case of a nation wide EHR system, eZdravje

Querying openEHR-based Electronic Health Record in the IHE XDS enviroment

This thesis presents the challenges related to adoption of electronic health record systems and use of standards to achieve functional and semantic interoperability. It focuses on the IHE XDS.b integration profile that enables interoperability of health information systems at the level of documentation handling. Semantic interoperability is presented from the aspect of structured data in exchanged documents establishing an openEHR based electronic health record system. Special attention is given to EHR search capabilities; IHE XDS.b search capabilities are limited to document metadata where content-based search is not supported. The key contribution of this work is a method for querying openEHR based Electronic Health Record in the IHE XDS environment. The conventional openEHR EHR System is extended to act as an IHE XDS Document Repository. Support for content-based queries is implemented through on-demand documents whose content is assembled using an AQL at the time of processing the retrieve request. The proposed method combines functional interoperability provided by the IHE integration profile XDS.b for the exchange of documents with semantic interoperability of openEHR based EHR system. The feasibility of the proposed method is presented on the case of a nation wide EHR system, eZdravje

Electronical Health Record's Systems. Interoperability

Understanding the importance that the electronic medical health records system has, with its various structural types and grades, has led to the elaboration of a series of standards and quality control methods, meant to control its functioning. In time, the electronic health records system has evolved along with the medical data's change of structure. Romania has not yet managed to fully clarify this concept, various definitions still being encountered, such as "Patient's electronic chart", "Electronic health file". A slow change from functional interoperability (OSI level 6) to semantic interoperability (level 7) is being aimed at the moment. This current article will try to present the main electronic files models, from a functional interoperability system's possibility to be created perspective. \ud \u

Biomedical Terminologies and Ontologies: Enabling Biomedical Semantic Interoperability and Standards in Europe

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource

Investigation Interoperability Problems in Pharmacy Automation: A Case Study in Saudi Arabia

The aim of this case study is to investigate the nature of interoperability problems in hospital systems automation. One of the advanced healthcare providers in Saudi Arabia is the host of the study. The interaction between the pharmacy system and automated medication dispensing cabinets is the focus of the case system. The research method is a detailed case study where multiple data collection methods are used. The modelling of the processes of inpatient pharmacy systems is presented using Business Process Model Notation. The data collected is analysed to study the different interoperability problems. This paper presents a framework that classifies health informatics interoperability implementation problems into technical, semantic, organisational levels. The detailed study of the interoperability problems in this case illustrates the challenges to the adoption of health information system automation which could help other healthcare organisations in their system automation projects

ARGOS policy brief on semantic interoperability

Semantic interoperability requires the use of standards, not only for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to be transferred and structurally mapped into a receiving repository, but also for the clinical content of the EHR to be interpreted in conformity with the original meanings intended by its authors. Accurate and complete clinical documentation, faithful to the patient’s situation, and interoperability between systems, require widespread and dependable access to published and maintained collections of coherent and quality-assured semantic resources, including models such as archetypes and templates that would (1) provide clinical context, (2) be mapped to interoperability standards for EHR data, (3) be linked to well specified, multi-lingual terminology value sets, and (4) be derived from high quality ontologies. Wide-scale engagement with professional bodies, globally, is needed to develop these clinical information standards

Semantic processing of EHR data for clinical research

There is a growing need to semantically process and integrate clinical data from different sources for clinical research. This paper presents an approach to integrate EHRs from heterogeneous resources and generate integrated data in different data formats or semantics to support various clinical research applications. The proposed approach builds semantic data virtualization layers on top of data sources, which generate data in the requested semantics or formats on demand. This approach avoids upfront dumping to and synchronizing of the data with various representations. Data from different EHR systems are first mapped to RDF data with source semantics, and then converted to representations with harmonized domain semantics where domain ontologies and terminologies are used to improve reusability. It is also possible to further convert data to application semantics and store the converted results in clinical research databases, e.g. i2b2, OMOP, to support different clinical research settings. Semantic conversions between different representations are explicitly expressed using N3 rules and executed by an N3 Reasoner (EYE), which can also generate proofs of the conversion processes. The solution presented in this paper has been applied to real-world applications that process large scale EHR data.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2015, preprint versio