Semantic enabled Cloud based EMR

Abstract

The core focus area of a hospital is the healthcare services that they provide to a patient. Managing a complex hospital management system by the hospital is a daunting task and this makes their focus diverted from healthcare services and into managing a server, a network and software. If the hospital information system is based on a cloud computing then all the management efforts are taken care of by the vendor and the hospital can again focus in their core focus area. EMR is usually a computerized legal medical record created in an organization that delivers care, such as a hospital and doctor's surgery and it allows storage, retrieval and manipulation of records. It is not a paper record made electronic. Growing trend of cloud computing reaches into EMR and allows all users to use the same software that is dynamically scalable. The project semantic enabled Cloud based EMR: Ambulatory module is a part of a bigger project being developed in HLH project. Health level Horizon (HLH) is a project of Semantic Research Lab, SEECS-NUST in which research is being carried out on interoperability of Healthcare information systems. In this project HL7 middleware software is also being developed with the funding of ICTR&D fund. Primary focus of this project is on HL7 version 3.0 Standard. Our proposed solution is cloud based and semantically healthy. It must be noted that each module in this system is a service and semantically sound. The prominent data exchange module should be given extra concentration as data on cloud should be compatible and accessible to all other EMR systems. We built an ambulatory module that will produce and maintain an EMR of patients whose medical condition requires hospitalization in emergency situation. In the developed system, following benefits are observed:  EMR web services that will reside on cloud.  There is no need of full fledge team for EMR software maintained because the solution will reside on cloud and it is accessible via web services.  Due to our cloud infrastructure based solution, cost is greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure.  Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using.  As we follow the functional criteria of HL7 model so we will gain the interoperability feature so that we can share data among different EMR systems.