Abstract
Interoperability within different healthcare systems (clinics/hospitals/pharmacies) remains an issue of further research due to a barrier in sharing of the patient’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) information. To solve this problem, cross healthcare system collaboration is required. This paper proposes an interoperability framework that enables a pharmacist to access an electronic version of the patient’s prescription from the doctor using a RESTFul API with ease. Semantic technology standards like Web Ontology Language (OWL), RDF (Resource Description Framework) and SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) were used to implement the framework using JENA semantic framework tool to demonstrate how interoperability is achieved between a pharmacy and a clinic JENA was used to generate the ontology models for the pharmacy called pharmacy.rdf and clinic called clinic.rdf. The two models contain all the information from the two isolated systems. The JENA reasoner was used to merge the two ontology models into a single model.rdf file for easy querying with SPARQL. The model.rdf file was uploaded into a triple store database created using FUSEKI server. SPARQL Endpoint generated from FUSEKI was used to query the triple store database using a RESTFul API. The system was able to query the triple store database and output the results containing the prescription name and its details in JSON and XML formats which can be read by both machines and humans.
Highlights
There has been a paradigm shift in the healthcare sector as many healthcare organisations have gradually migrated paper-based patient medical records to digital electronic ones by the implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems [1]
SPARQL Endpoint generated from FUSEKI was used to query the triple store database using a RESTFul Application Programming Interface (API)
It is the SPARQL Endpoint that is required on all triple store databases to access and query the ontologies
Summary
There has been a paradigm shift in the healthcare sector as many healthcare organisations have gradually migrated paper-based patient medical records to digital electronic ones by the implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems [1]. The EHR information to be shared is stored in healthcare systems that are heterogeneously distributed. The information of these systems are in different file formats and the systems themselves are mainly proprietary [2]. HL7 International organization has issued a semantic base draft standards called Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) [10]. REST technology is generally preferred to the more robust Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) [12] technology because REST leverages less bandwidth, making it more suitable for use on the internet Organizations such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook have all created REST APIs that allow third-party developers to access information from their systems so they can use it and build new applications
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