Standards and solutions for eHealth Interoperability-

Abstract

There is no doubt that the way to high quality, safe and e cient health services leads to distributed cooperative care (shared care) supported by information and communication technologies [1]. Such approach requires interoperability between all principals (persons, organizations, devices, applications, components) involved [1]. Nevertheless, many papers and organizations (e.g. [2]) dedicated to health care interoperability still refer to the IEEE Dictionary de nition of (semantic) interoperability as ... the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged [3]. However, the problem of interoperability is not limited to the early days' EDI challenge of harmonized data representation and exchange protocol. Nowadays, it is the challenge of the legally, culturally, socially, educationally and organizationally impacted aspect of commonality regarding business processes and objectives, but also interests, knowledge and skills to cooperate for jointly meeting those business objectives [1]. Those aspects go far beyond ICT ontology and communication protocols as commonly understood today. Depending on the sharing of those common aspects, comprehensive interoperability can be provided at di erent interoperability levels such as structural, syntactic, semantic or services, semantic, or services interoperability depending on the level of shared knowledge and skills [1].