Towards Semantic Healthcare with Interoperable Processes

Abstract

Healthcare systems face severe issues in interoperability because of gaps in inter processes communication. Researchers and prac- titioner are trying to make systems interoperable and integrate for the bene t of all the stakeholders including hospitals, clini- cians, medical support sta , and patients. Interoperability, how- ever, can only be achieved when standards are practiced. HL7 is one of the key standard for communication of medical infor- mation across and within the healthcare systems. Two di erent healthcare systems can earn HL7 conformance and compliance, yet can be incompatible for integration because of varying im- plementation of HL7 interaction model. This is mainly because work ows in healthcare systems are very complex. Their in- teroperability on one hand requires exible mechanism for the mapping of business processes to a standard. On the other hand, it requires deeper understanding of the standard HL7 interac- tion model and cracks created by their incompatible implemen- tations. In this thesis a novel approach is proposed for dynam- ically creating semantic web services as overlay on top of the existing services. These semantic services are mapped to the interaction model ontology. Integrated reasoning mechanism in WSMX framework provides necessary execution semantics for more e ective and seamless end-to-end communication. The proposed solution complements the existing semantic data in- teroperability in HL7 and leads to true semantic process inter- operability.