JSON-LD as an Interchange Technology to Facilitate Health Information Exchange

Abstract

Sharing information between medical records to form a comprehensive electronic health record leads to effective health management. However, full implementation of an electronic health record has met various barriers including companies wanting to protect their proprietary data storage formats and resisting conversion to a common data exchange format. Through the development of prototype systems, this article investigates the use of JSON-LD as an interpreter to aid in data interchange and data encapsulation. The prototypes demonstrate that JSON-LD can be applied, with nominal code changes, to an existing electronic medical record system employing JSON as a serialization protocol. This article concludes that JSON-LD works as an efficient wrapper that, when well designed, allows for simplified and robust consumption from and serving of data to other JSON-LD enabled medical systems, thereby elevating the usability and effective interconnectivity of new and existing electronic medical record systems.