Heterogeneous Healthcare Research Articles

A Semantically Enriched Clinical Guideline Model Enabling Deployment in Heterogeneous Healthcare Environments

Clinical guidelines are developed to assist healthcare practitioners to make decisions on patient's medical problems, and as such they communicate with external applications to retrieve patient data to initiate medical actions through clinical workflows, and transmit information to alert/reminder systems. The interoperability problems in the healthcare information technology domain prevent wider deployment of clinical guidelines because each deployment requires a tedious custom adaptation phase. In this paper, we provide machine-processable mechanisms that express the semantics of clinical guideline interfaces so that automated processes can be used to access the clinical resources for guideline deployment and execution. To be able to deploy the semantically extended guidelines to healthcare settings semiautomatically, the underlying application's semantics must also be available. We describe how this can be achieved based on two prominent implementation technologies in use in the eHealth domain: integrating healthcare enterprise cross-enterprise document sharing integration profile for discovering and exchanging electronic healthcare records and Web service technology for interacting with the clinical workflows and wireless medical sensor devices. The system described in this paper is realized within the scope of the SAPHIRE Project.

A context-specific mediating schema approach for information exchange between heterogeneous hospital systems

Secure and seamless exchange of electronic patient-care information among heterogeneous interoperable systems is an important goal for future healthcare information systems. However, fast and efficient exchange of information between heterogeneous healthcare systems is inhibited by the variations in the data models used to define patient-care records, and the prohibitive costs associated with standardisation and software upgrades. In this paper, we analyse the factors impeding the adoption of interoperable healthcare systems and propose the use of a mediating schema-based approach that can enable interoperability and also minimise the impact of the impeding factors. The proposed mechanism uses context-specific mediating schemas for data translation and can enable the seamless exchange of electronic patient-care records between different healthcare systems. Our approach builds on existing technologies and is specifically adapted to the healthcare context. We illustrate the viability of our approach using a scenario relating to pre-hospital to hospital information exchange.

A Context-Specific Mediating Schema Approach for Information Exchange between Heterogeneous Hospital Systems

Secure and seamless exchange of electronic patient care information among heterogeneous interoperable systems is an important goal for future healthcare information systems. However, fast and efficient exchange of information between heterogeneous healthcare systems is inhibited by the variations in the data models used to define patient care records, and the prohibitive costs associated with standardization and software upgrades. In this paper, we analyze the factors impeding the adoption of interoperable healthcare systems and propose the use of a mediating schema-based approach that can enable interoperability and also minimizes the impact of the factors impeding factors. The proposed mechanism uses context specific mediating schemas for data translation and can enable the seamless exchange of electronic patient care records between different healthcare systems. Our approach builds on existing technologies and is specifically adapted to the healthcare context. We illustrate the viability of our approach using a scenario relating to pre-hospital to hospital information exchange.

Healthcare Information Framework.

CEN committee TC 251 Medical Informatics, has set up a project team charged with producing a European pre-standard ENV on Healthcare Information Framework (HIF). The HIF is based on abstraction from a specific information system architecture to a reference architecture and further to a conceptual architectural framework based on serving open, distributed and heterogeneous healthcare enterprises. To specify the suitable healthcare information system architecture modelling of the healthcare enterprise is required. As there is no one method serving all needs, the HIF gives guidance on what aspects to look at in selecting a suitable modelling method. It is expected that the work will be completed by early 1995.