A Case Study on Implementation of Health Data Standards for Smart Healthcare

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other health standards are in use for quite some time now in some of the developed countries. Simultaneously, with the advancement of ICT-based infrastructure for providing smart healthcare services, volume of health data has increased vastly and storage and management of this huge volume ofdata, which also have the other properties of big data, has evolved as a major challenge. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the presently available EHR standards and other related standards can adequately handle the data, which are generated through a smart healthcare system. Here, we consider some of the well-known EHR standards and related standards, which have been proposed and are commonly used in various countries. These standards are studied in the context of data storage, data representation and data handling. Suitability of these standards is analyzed in terms of different evaluation factors, such as portability, scalability, and interoperability. Moreover, the implementation experiences of these standards are also considered. For this analysis, the authors consulted the survey papers and research papers describing the experiences of the researchers, as well as the users. The paper concludes that in a smart healthcare system various types of data are generated, that include structured data like EHRs, as well as unstructured clinical data of patients, some of which need to be accessed quickly and frequently. Thus, an EHR system should be supplemented with models for representing unstructured data. A suitable ontology is required for designing a storage structure for storing healthcare data.