Healthcare Data Validation and Conformance Testing Approach Using Rule-based Reasoning

Abstract

HL7 community is profoundly involved in the development of standards in order to exchange, share and retrieve health related information. FHIR is an emerging standard of HL7 that encourages use of JSON as a data serialization approach. JSON is notoriously exible and schema-less approach compared to XML but it is very developer-friendly and concise in content presentation. Validation of healthcare data is crucial task because errors in this data can result in serious consequences that can lead up to increased mortality rate. Currently there does not exist a validator that can validate and conform data as per FHIR. This paper presents an approach to validate healthcare data embodied in JSON documents and to test its conformance with HL7 FHIR standard. We rst developed Description Logic (DL) based schema of the FHIR data model. JSON data is then translated to RDF and we apply rule-based reasoning to validate the data. As veri ed by results,design of the validation algorithm ensures that a validation step is performed in sub sec-onds and overall system remains e cient. Further, the rule based reasoning used to test conformance provides aid in identifying incompatibilities in data which should be xed to bridge the gaps in achieving interoperability.