The challenge of richly interpreting electronic health information, in order to
populate EHR instances with suitable terms, to provide decision support in the care
of individuals, to identify suitable patients for teaching or clinical trials recruitment,
and to mine populations of records for public health or to discover new medical
knowledge, all require that the heterogeneous clinical entry instances within EHR
repositories can be systematically analysed and interpreted.
Achieving this requires the combination and co-operation of many different health
informatics tools and technologies, underpinned by shared representations of
clinical concepts and inferencing formalisms. Much of this work is at the level of
R&D, and is well represented across the Semantic Mining consortium.
The challenge of WP26 is to build up a vision of the ways in which these
historically independent threads of health informatics research can collaborate, and
uncover the research challenges that are needed in order to deliver good
demonstrations of semantically indexed and richly analysable EHRs.
The partners have begun WP26 by acquiring a better knowledge of each other’s
areas of endeavour, and are beginning to steer their research interests towards
future areas of collaboration
