Interoperability Of Healthcare Systems Research Articles

Enhancement of Semantic Interoperability in Healthcare Systems Using IFCIoT Architecture

Enhancement of Semantic Interoperability in Healthcare Systems Using IFCIoT Architecture

Dentistry and Interoperability

Information has become the vital commodity of exchange in recent decades. Medicine is no exception; the importance of patient information in the digital form has been recognized by organizations and health care facilities. Almost all patient information, including medical history, radiographs, and feedback, can be digitally recorded synchronously and asynchronously. Nevertheless, patient information that could be shared and reused to enhance care delivery is not readily available in a format that could be understood by the systems in recipient health care facilities. The systems used in medical and dental clinics today lack the ability to communicate with each other. The critical information is stagnant in isolated silos, unable to be shared, analyzed, and reused. In this article, we propose enabling interoperability in health care systems that could facilitate communication across systems for the benefit of patients and caregivers. We explain in this article the importance of interoperable data, the international interoperability standards available, and the range of benefits and opportunities that interoperability can create in dentistry for providers and patients alike.

A Patient-Centric Healthcare Framework Reference Architecture for Better Semantic Interoperability Based on Blockchain, Cloud, and IoT

Due to the distributed and non-integrated nature of the healthcare systems which results from the application-centric view it leads to a challenging task to manage healthcare data exchange (heterogeneity problem). On the other hand, Blockchain technologies are emerging as promising and cost-effective means to meet some of these requirements due to their inherent design properties, such as secure cryptography and a resilient peer-to-peer network. Likewise, Blockchain-based applications can benefit the healthcare domain via their properties of asset sharing, and audit trails of data access. Existing work mainly pays attention to centralized and blockchain-based mechanisms. But it doesn’t realize the increase need for better data interoperability amount multiple healthcare systems and services. This requires shifting from the application-centric solutions toward the patient-centric solutions. This paper presents A secure and efficient framework based on Blockchain, Cloud, and IoT named Patient-Centric Healthcare Framework (PCH) for better healthcare systems interoperability. A tiered-based architecture (5 tiers) with collaboration is designed for the feasible realization of PCH. Also, the design and implementation aspects start from the layering diagram, system context, and detailed reference architecture that emphasizes the detailed component topology and interactions within the framework. An electronic medical record is used to show how healthcare data is processed with the required security considerations. Then, an evaluation of PCH against the existing Blockchain-based healthcare frameworks is conducted. The results analysis demonstrates that PCH offers practical solutions to protect healthcare data and support efficient data sharing with better interoperability.

Methodology for clinical integration of e-Health sensor-based smart device technology with cloud architecture

The international healthcare systems interoperability is an unresolved technological area at the moment. This paper demonstrates the results of the software engineering research for simplex syntactic and semantic technical interoperability of hospital information systems, eHealth smart device technology and clinical telemedicine instruments through the recently developed Telemedicine Interoperability Hub. Several similar experiments exist. This research is unique in building a prototype interconnecting not only healthcare information systems with each other, but aiming to establish a general healthcare interoperability scheme including also the eHealth smart devices and telemedicine instruments. The aim of this research is to establish cloud-based data interchange capability with the newly developed information technology system interconnected with the emerging eHealth Internet of Things solutions and the classical hospital information system architecture. Notwithstanding the international information technology medical data exchange standards, like Health Level Seven, the adoption of an industry-wide open telemedicine syntactic and semantic interoperability standard is necessary. The research studied varying simplex, duplex, full-duplex, data package- and file-based information technology modalities establishing stable system interconnection among clinical instruments, healthcare systems and eHealth smart devices. This research is the manifestation of the trilateral cooperation of the University of Debrecen Department of Information Technology, Semmelweis University Second Paediatric Clinic and T-Systems Healthcare Competence Center Central and Eastern Europe. The developed experimental software engineering solution was embedded in hybrid cloud architecture after testing private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Public Cloud Software-as-a-Service technical solutions.

A Security based Framework for Interoperability of Healthcare Systems

The healthcare domain requires the seamless, secured and meaningful exchange of health related information for effective and efficient patient care. These information are highly sensitive and they are meant to be highly confidential. However, health related information are usually distributed across several heterogeneous and autonomous healthcare systems which makes the interoperability process prone to abuse, medical fraud, inappropriate disclosure of patients’ information for secondary purposes by unauthorized persons and misuse. The effects of inadequate security and privacy in healthcare include monetary penalties, loss of revenue, damage to the healthcare system reputation, risk of receiving less information for optimum care, decreased quality of patients’ care as well as threat to patients’ lives. Consequently, effective information protection within the healthcare domain is highly significant. Hence, this paper examines the security and privacy policies that safeguard sensitive and confidential information in healthcare systems during the exchange and use of vital health information. The paper also proposes a security based framework that seeks to mitigate security risks in healthcare, and thus protect the integrity, confidentiality, and access to health related information.

Process interoperability in healthcare systems with dynamic semantic web services

Healthcare systems are very complex due to extreme heterogeneity in their data and processes. Researchers and practitioner need to make systems interoperable and integrate for the benefit of all the stakeholders including hospitals, clinicians, medical support staff, and patients. The broader goal of interoperability can only be achieved when standards are practiced.Two different healthcare systems can earn HL7 conformance and compliance but at the same time can be incompatible for interoperability because of varying implementation of HL7 interaction model. This is mainly because workflows in healthcare systems are very complex. Interoperability on one hand requires flexible mechanism for the mapping of business processes to a standard, HL7 in our example. On the other hand it requires deeper understanding of the standard interaction model and gaps created by their incompatible implementations. In this paper we propose a novel technique of dynamically creating semantic web services as overlay on top of the existing services. We used Web Service Modeling Framework as an underlying architecture for HL7 process artifacts implementation as semantic web services. These semantic services are mapped to our proposed interaction ontology. Integrated reasoning mechanism provides necessary execution semantics for more effective and seamless end-to-end communication.The prototype we tested on different processes from the laboratory domain at a local diagnostic laboratory with uninterrupted process flow. The scenario of Result Query Placer interaction flow and its associated process artifacts are executed for the proof of concept.The proposed solution complements the existing data interoperability in HL7 and leads to semantic process interoperability. The achievement of semantic interoperability results in timely delivery of healthcare services to patients saving precious lives.