Using the ResearchEHR platform to facilitate the practical application of the EHR standards

Abstract

Possibly the most important requirement to support co-operative work among health professionals and institutions is the ability of sharing EHRs in a meaningful way, and it is widely acknowledged that standardization of data and concepts is a prerequisite to achieve semantic interoperability in any domain. Different international organizations are working on the definition of EHR architectures but the lack of tools that implement them hinders their broad adoption. In this paper we present ResearchEHR, a software platform whose objective is to facilitate the practical application of EHR standards as a way of reaching the desired semantic interoperability. This platform is not only suitable for developing new systems but also for increasing the standardization of existing ones. The work reported here describes how the platform allows for the edition, validation, and search of archetypes, converts legacy data into normalized, archetypes extracts, is able to generate applications from archetypes and finally, transforms archetypes and data extracts into other EHR standards. We also include in this paper how ResearchEHR has made possible the application of the CEN/ISO 13606 standard in a real environment and the lessons learnt with this experience.

Leveraging electronic healthcare record standards and semantic web technologies for the identification of patient cohorts

“…This is a progress with respect to our previous work because we had used ontologies for representing archetypes and data to facilitate clinical data and models interoperability, 7 and used knowledgerich clinical models based on archetypes to link clinical decision support systems with EHR systems, 38 39 but never combined in an effective data analysis pipeline as proposed here.…”

“…Thus, specific domain concept definitions are needed rather than the generic concepts provided by EHR architectures. Examples of such definitions are openEHR/ ISO13606 archetypes, 7 clinical document architecture templates, and detailed clinical models. 8 Currently, the Clinical Information Modeling Initiative (CIMI) 9 is working on providing a common format for the definition of health information content.…”

“…Finally, we defined the mapping between the first-and second-level archetypes. In this case and due to the presence of aggregation functions we employed a structural mapping 7 to control the grouping context. An excerpt of this mapping is shown in figure 3.…”

Archetype-based data warehouse environment to enable the reuse of electronic health record data

“…In our case, in openEHR format following the constraints defined in an archetype. To perform this transformation we make use of LinkEHR studio [42,43]. This tool is designed to facilitate the transformation of legacy data into archetype-compliant data.…”

Recent Research Areas and Grand Challenges in Electronic Medical Record: A Literature Survey Approach

“…Additionally, Jose Alberto Maldonado in his paper" Using the ResearchEHR platform to facilitate the practical application of the EHR standards" presented a software platform to reach desired semantic interoperability [26].…”