Standard-based data and service interoperability in eHealth systems

Abstract

International standardization in information representation, organization, and dissemination are meant to eliminate the discrepancies in communication among participating organizations and institutions in a particular domain. The management of domain information will then allow different participants to integrate their legacy information or application servers to a nation-wide network and use widely approved services to communicate their proprietary data and services with a large group of clients. In this context, traditional healthcare information systems require fundamental re-engineering to new network-centric environments in order to reduce the huge costs of healthcare while maintaining the expected quality of public health. This integration using new HL7 v3 standards and leading-edge information technologies will be the initial steps for shifting towards an interoperable healthcare environment. This paper aims at addressing new challenges in standard-based interoperability provision among legacy healthcare information systems, while adhering to international and national standards for data and service representations. We introduce a framework to employ healthcare standards and clinical terminology systems to achieve semantic interoperability between distributed electronic medical record (EMR) systems. A real world case study for integration of a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) with the EMR of a specialist will be presented.