Search Efficient Representation of Healthcare Data based on the HL7 RIM

Abstract

The Reference Information Model (RIM) of Health Level Seven (HL7) standard is a conceptual information model for health care. Data of HL7 RIM Observation class are sparse, high dimensional, and require frequent schema change. Entity Attribute Value (EAV) is the widely used solution to handle these above challenges of medical data, but EAV is not search efficient for knowledge extraction. In this paper, we have proposed a search efficient data model: Optimized Entity Attribute Value (OEAV) for physical representation of medical data as alternative of widely used EAV model. We have implemented EAV or OEAV individually to model RIM Observation class and used relational model for the remaining RIM classes. We have shown that OEAV is dramatically search efficient and occupy less storage space compared to EAV.