Authors:
Emanuele Baj
1
;
Nicola Restifo
1
;
Ilaria Marzolla
1
;
Nicola Restifo
1
;
Silvia Bragagia
2
and
Gianni Origgi
2
Affiliations:
1
Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Italy
;
2
A.O. Ospedale Niguarda Ca’ Granda – S.C. ICT, Italy
Keyword(s):
eHealth, Healthcare Management Systems, Electronic Health Record, Semantic and Syntactic Interoperability, Pathology Networks.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
Collaboration and e-Services
;
Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation
;
Data Engineering
;
e-Business
;
e-Health
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Healthcare Management Systems
;
Integration/Interoperability
;
Interoperability
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Semantic Interoperability
;
Sensor Networks
;
Simulation and Modeling
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software and Architectures
;
Support for Clinical Decision-Making
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Interoperability between Healthcare Management Systems is a fundamental requirement to improve the quality of care, to assure patients continuous assistance and to improve clinical research. Pathology Networks create a common virtual environment which allows to overcome single HIS’ borders, by connecting different healthcare organizations adopting common formats to share clinical data and, consequently, knowledge. Syntactic and semantic standards are paramount to enable interoperability in this context, since common document formats ensure efficient communication, while internationally known vocabularies allow the unambiguous interpretation of contents. This paper has the purpose to show a real experience of participation to a Pathology Network, providing a model based on open standards which could be taken as a reference model for similar initiatives in other healthcare environments. Benefits resulting from such an initiative will be presented, in terms of improvement for clinical r
esearch and quality of patients’ care. The real case we describe is an example of how Pathology Networks can provide scientific features to Electronic Health Records, by adding information not usually reported on standard clinical sheets, but necessary to perform new analysis with the purpose of improving clinical research.
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