Interoperability in eHealth systems

  • Authors:
  • Asuman Dogac

  • Affiliations:
  • SRDC Ltd., METU Technopolis, Ankara, Turkey

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Interoperability in eHealth systems is important for delivering quality healthcare and reducing healthcare costs. Some of the important use cases include coordinating the care of chronic patients by enabling the co-operation of many different eHealth systems such as Electronic Health Record Systems (EHRs), Personal Health Record Systems (PHRs) and wireless medical sensor devices; enabling secondary use of EHRs for clinical research; being able to share life long EHRs among different healthcare providers. Although achieving eHealth interoperability is quite a challenge both because there are competing standards and clinical information itself is very complex, there have been a number of successful industry initiatives such as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Profiles, as well as large scale deployments such as the National Health Information System of Turkey and the epSOS initiative for sharing Electronic Health Records and ePrescriptions in Europe. This article briefly describes the subjects discussed in the VLDB 2012 tutorial to provide an overview of the issues in eHealth interoperability describing the key technologies and standards, identifying important use cases and the associated research challenges and also describing some of the large scale deployments. The aim is to foster further interest in this area.