Chapter 8 - A research review on semantic interoperability issues in electronic health record systems in medical healthcare

Abstract

With constantly diminishing costs and prolonged effectiveness of wireless communication and transmission techniques and, importantly, the Internet of Things (IoT) emerging as a powerful technology, some aspects of our lives have changed and broadened. The healthcare sector in particular is a developing and highly demanding application sector. IoT contributions to the medical healthcare domain include remote health and monitoring services, care for the elderly, recognition as well as tactical management of chronic illnesses, and offering of adaptive and self-regulated medical facilities. In medical healthcare, electronic health record (EHR) systems provide efficient management of clinical records in today’s clinical healthcare organizations. However, medical records are generating huge amounts of data, with every medical record having its own standard pattern, schema, and level of abstraction and interoperability. To interact with EHRs, medical stakeholders must use standard and well-structured methods and ontology-based languages to analyze and mine the useful information from huge data records. Much research has been done on interoperability issues, particularly syntactic interoperability and technical interoperability. After reviewing the research articles and chapters from respected medical databases such as IEEE Xplore, Elsevier, and Science Direct, the authors noted that semantic interoperability is, in the EHR framework, one of the critical issues. To achieve full semantic interoperability, researchers and scholars have developed and structured numerous methodologies, tools, and techniques. This research review thus includes methodologies, frameworks, tools, and models, along with their advantages and limitations, developed by researchers to cope with semantic interoperability issues in medical healthcare. Furthermore, in this chapter, the authors have focused on searching the papers related to the semantic web with a model-driven architecture (MDA) approach for semantic interoperability. Applications of the MDA approach and advanced features of the semantic web may be able to resolve the issue of semantic interoperability.