Authors:
Juha Puustjärvi
1
and
Leena Puustjärvi
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Helsinki, Finland
;
2
The Pharmacy of Kaivopuisto, Finland
Keyword(s):
HL7, Clinical Document Architecture, Electronic Health Record, Information Integration, XML-databases, Ontologies.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
Databases and Datawarehousing
;
e-Health
;
Electronic Health Records and Standards
;
Health Information Systems
;
Healthcare Management Systems
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Semantic Interoperability
Abstract:
Although the original purpose of the HL7’s Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) was to deliver clinical summaries between healthcare organizations, nowadays they are increasingly used for collecting patients’ health documentation from various healthcare providers. Usually the collected CCD documents are organized into hierarchical structures that simplify the search of documents, e.g., grouping together the documents by episode, clinical specialty or time period. Yet each clinical document is stored as a stand-alone artefact, meaning that each document is complete and whole in itself. Considering each document only as a complete and a whole in itself also has its drawback: the efficient usage of patients’ health documentation often is data centric, meaning that data should be extracted from various documents and then integrated according to specific criteria. Processing such queries requires the integration of the data of the CCD documents. In this paper we present two methods for inte
grating CDD documents. In the first method an XML-database is developed and the content of the documents are stored in the database. So the content of clinical documentation can be effectively accessed by database query languages such as SQL. In the second method an OWL ontology for CDD documents is developed and the CCD documents are transformed in the format that is compliant with the ontology and then stored in the ontology. So the content of clinical documentation can be easily accessed by query languages such as RQL and SPARQL. Which integration method is appropriate depends on whether the CDD documents are based on CDA Level 2 or CDA Level 3.
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