Semantic Health Mediation and Access Control Manager for Interoperability Among Healthcare Systems

Healthcare systems have evolved to become more patient-centric. Many efforts have been made to transform paper-based patient data to automated medical information by developing electronic healthcare records (EHRs). Several international EHRs standards have been enabling healthcare interoperability and communication among a wide variety of medical centres. It is a dual-model methodology which comprises a reference information model and an archetype model. The archetype is responsible for the definition of clinical concepts which has limitations in terms of supporting complex reasoning and knowledge discovery requirements. The objective of this article is to propose a semantic-mediation architecture to support semantic interoperability among healthcare organizations. It provides an intermediate semantic layer to exploit clinical information based on richer ontological representations to create a "model of meaning" for enabling semantic mediation. The proposed model also provides secure mechanisms to allow interoperable sharing of patient data between healthcare organizations.