Semantic Integration in Healthcare Networks

A seamless support of information flow for increasingly distributed healthcare processes requires to integrate heterogeneous IT systems into a comprehensive distributed information system. Different standards contribute to ease this integration. In a research project focussing on the development of a reference architecture for inter-institutional health information systems, we identified concurring standards currently in use. We therefore categorized these integration standards by distinguishing between technical and semantic integration on the one hand, and data and functional integration on the other hand. In addition, standards for semantic integration are roughly categorized according to their scope. By placing standards into a corresponding matrix a "semantic gap" is revealed, which cannot be covered by standards as it contains volatile medical concepts. As a conclusion, it is recommended to conceptually consider the necessity of system evolution in system architectures and also in future integration standards.

[1]  Nandish V. Patel.  Adaptive Evolutionary Information Systems , 2002 .

[2]  Stanley M. Huff,et al.  Report of conference track 2: pathways to open architectures , 2003, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[3]  Athman Bouguettaya,et al.  Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems , 1998, The Springer International Series on Advances in Database Systems.

[4]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching , 2001, The VLDB Journal.

[5]  T Beale,et al.  Archetypes: Constraint-based Domain Models for Future-proof Information Systems , 2000, OOPSLA 2000.

[6]  Sandra Heiler,et al.  Semantic interoperability , 1995, CSUR.

[7]  Klaus A. Kuhn,et al.  Towards a continuous evolution and adaptation of information systems in healthcare , 2004, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[8]  P. V. Biron,et al.  The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture. , 2001, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA.

[9]  K A Kuhn,et al.  The Core Problem : Autonomy and Consistency , 2018 .

[10]  Stefan Conrad,et al.  Schemaintegration Integrationskonflikte, Lösungsansätze, aktuelle Herausforderungen , 2002, Informatik Forschung und Entwicklung.

[11]  Paul Vegoda,et al.  Introducing the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) concept. , 2002, Journal of healthcare information management : JHIM.

[12]  Gustavo Alonso,et al.  Web Services: Concepts, Architectures and Applications , 2009 .

[13]  共立出版株式会社.  コンピュータ・サイエンス : ACM computing surveys , 1978 .

[14]  Robert M. Colomb.  Impact of Semantic Heterogeneity and Federating Databases , 1997, Comput. J..

[15]  Venkataraman Ramesh,et al.  Management of Heterogeneous and Autonomous Database Systems , 1999 .