Semantic Web Technologies in the Quest for Compatible Distributed Health Records

Abstract: There is a proliferation of patient bound Electronic Health Record (EHR) data in systems that are incompatible - challenging the goal of granting authorized access to the accumulated medical history of a patient, whenever requested, and whichever the source, in order to secure a safe treatment. A common semantic representation is a prerequisite for validating the semantics of one EHR system against another. Therefore, assessing the semantic compatibility between systems implies having a formal method for extracting their semantics, and for validating the consistency of their combined semantics. A guiding hypothesis is that Semantic Web Technologies and Ontology Web Language (OWL) are potential bridging technologies between the EHRs and medical terminologies, and can be used to represent the combined semantics of the systems to be integrated. Furthermore, that automatic reasoners can perform semantic validation of the combined subsystems. Some experimental steps in this direction are taken, preceded by a discussion on Medical Terminologies, Ontologies, EHR-systems and theirinterrelationships, and a summary overview of Description Logics, the Semantic Web and the Web Ontology Language, OWL. The OpenEHR reference model is transformed from an XML-schema representation to OWL, and a couple of archetypes are transformed into OWL in a manual procedure. Subsequently, validation runs with a formal reasoner on the transformed results were performed, demonstrating the feasibility of the process. The problems of EHR semantic interoperability are complex. Awareness of the necessity of applying formal semantic methods when dealing with inherently semantic problems will catalyze the process of solving them.