D.3.09. Advanced Interoperability Techniques: Design and Open Specification v1

One of the biggest issues to achieve full semantic interoperability in healthcare in which all the systems seamlessly communicate with each other is still pending. In an ideal environment, the patient would have all the clinical information coming from heterogeneous providers integrated and available in a common format. For the stakeholders, it would avoid missing or duplication of clinical information, reducing the hospitals costs. For patients, it would imply better diagnosis and treatment likewise reducing visits to hospitals thus improving their daily live, anywhere at any time.

Nevertheless, the healthcare systems nowadays are far from this ideal vision. Proprietary and closed tools are employed by most/all of the clinics and hospitals and even in the same hospital there is a myriad of subsystems completely disconnected from each other.

The present deliverable defines the initial design of the Interoperability solution proposed for the CrowdHEALTH project and it is a step forward in the connection between two basic pillars for the representation of clinical information, domain specific content models and common terminologies. It is focused on the creation of a set of tools that fulfils the needs of interoperability of both pillars, and therefore three main components are needed to address each of the basic pillars, plus a component to orchestrate both knowledge levels:

•  Rule engine: Implementation of the business logic and;
•  Structure mapping: Storing knowledge about the mapping of clinical information models.
•  Terminology service: Storing knowledge about code systems or medical terminologies.

The complete description of the components that comprise the overall solution will be detailed in deliverable D3.12.