HL7RIM Compliant Healthcare Laboratory Database Information System

Abstract

Hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare facilities around the world require the ability to send and receive healthcare data, including patient information and various lab reports. As a result, vast amount of healthcare information is exchanged on a daily basis. So there is a need to store this information in database repository. But problem with this approach is that every organization has a different format or structure of database to store the data. There is no single standard followed by database community to design database schema for healthcare laboratory domain. This heterogeneity creates lot of issues when database schema needs to be formatted in a specific standard such as Health Level Seven (HL7) RIM for information exchange purposes. RIM has a predefined structure including the core classes, attributes and standard value sets for these attributes comes from predefined vocabularies. The main intention of RIM is to represent data contents in HL7 message. But it can also be extended to provide baseline for storing the healthcare data. This approach has many challenges to identify mappings between the RIM and the Relational Databases e.g. mapping at class/table level, attributes/column level, Association/Relationships, and between data types. Designing the RIM based Database is a non-trivial task due to complexity in RIM structure, terminologies and data types. This work provides methodology of designing RIM base database structure that initially support Laboratory domain. It also elaborates techniques that handles mapping of various structure of RIM like classes, data types and attributes to relational database schema. This new design of database schema will resolve the mapping issue between database schema elements and HL7 RIM data items miss-matching. It also reduce development of HL7 Interfacing cost by eliminating the design of mapper component required to map HL7 messages to database and vice a versa.