A Cloud-based Approach for Interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHRs)

TLDR

Cloud computing offers benefits to patients, providers, and payers, yet the absence of interoperability standards hampers data exchange across stakeholders. The authors propose CHISTAR, a cloud-based architecture that enables semantic interoperability among electronic health record systems. CHISTAR is built on a generic reference and archetype model and implemented with loosely coupled, asynchronously communicating cloud components to support semantic interoperability, data integration, and security.

Abstract

We present a cloud-based approach for the design of interoperable electronic health record (EHR) systems. Cloud computing environments provide several benefits to all the stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem (patients, providers, payers, etc.). Lack of data interoperability standards and solutions has been a major obstacle in the exchange of healthcare data between different stakeholders. We propose an EHR system - cloud health information systems technology architecture (CHISTAR) that achieves semantic interoperability through the use of a generic design methodology which uses a reference model that defines a general purpose set of data structures and an archetype model that defines the clinical data attributes. CHISTAR application components are designed using the cloud component model approach that comprises of loosely coupled components that communicate asynchronously. In this paper, we describe the high-level design of CHISTAR and the approaches for semantic interoperability, data integration, and security.