2 BACKGROUND AND
ANALYSIS
Experts unanimously agree that physical activity has
many health benefits and numerous research studies
spanning across multiple decades has proven to
show its impact the overall health of an individual
and nation’s economy. With the goal to improve the
activity level of individuals across the United States,
in 2007, the American Medical Association and the
American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM)
collaborated to launch the program - Exercise is
Medicine (EIM) (Lobelo et al., 2014). The goal of
the program is to make physical activity a standard
and adapt scientifically proven benefits of physical
activity into the mainstream healthcare. The idea is
for the physicians to access the activity level of the
patient (use of the Physical Activity Vital Sign
(PAVS) questionnaire (Lobelo et al., 2014, Sallis,
2011) during the patient’s encounter and prescribe
physical activity based on the identified health risks
and ACSM evidence-based guidelines. The physical
activity prescription, similar to medication
prescription, must be saved and tracked along with
other data. The most effective way to achieve this
goal is to integrate activity data with an EHR. The
intention of the EIM is congruent with the research
statement and supports the need for healthcare
standard(s) to integrate the activity data with an
EHR.
Beyond EIM framework, there are only a few
research studies that have identified and reported the
need to save physical activity data for longitudinal
healthcare analysis and benefits. Sallis (2011)
pushed to treat physical activity as a vital sign.
Physicians must record and observer the patient’s
physical activity levels during their medical visits
once recognized as a vital sign by the healthcare
community. Coleman et al., (2012) presented facts
and validity of Exercise Vital Sign (EVS), similar to
PAVS, for its use in an outpatient electronic medical
record. After analysing the current research and
healthcare standards, the primary reason for the
interoperability issues is due to the lack of agreed
healthcare standards, both structural and semantic,
for representing and sharing activity data. As the
standards are a foundation for interoperability, it’s
surprising that the experts have not yet designed an
interoperable standard to capture physical activities
and exercises. Without an agreed standard, it’s not
feasible to capture, share and integrate the activity
data into the healthcare systems. Few standards are
scalable and can be extended to meet various
healthcare requirements, in our case capture activity
data. For instance, HL7 V2 (Boone, 2011)
messaging format is a pipe (|) and hat (^) encoding
format that allows clinicians to exchange data.
However, this standard is not supported by a
software model with a well-defined structure and
semantics. Due to this drawback, experts developed
the HL7 V3 (Boone, 2011) messaging format. Thus,
it doesn’t add any value to extend the HL7 V2
format to achieve our goal. The HL7 V3 is built
using HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM)
(Boone, 2011) – a sound object-oriented model with
a well-defined structure, semantics, and constraints
that can be extended. The current HL7 RIM model
can be repurposed to capture and communicate a
limited set of activity data. For example, activities
such as jogging, swimming, etc. and the vitals
generated during the activities can be represented
and communicated using HL7 V3 messages. Figure
2a shows the activity jogging (the subject of the
message) and heartbeat (outcome (OUTC)
relationship), an outcome of the subject in HL7 V3
format.
Saripalle (2017) extended the HL 7 RIM model
with required classes to capture the activity data.
Later, HL7 V3 messages were constructed based on
the extended model to share the activity data across
healthcare systems that accept HL7 V3 messaging
format. Figure 2b shows the extended model. The
classes, PhysicalActivity and ExercisePlan, that
capture the required data. authors to use this
document for the preparation of the camera-ready.
There are two key lessons learned from this
research. First, the HL7 RIM is a complex model
that can be difficult to comprehend. Further,
understanding HL7 V3 messaging format has a steep
learning curve that requires expertise in computing.
Second, there are only a few open-source healthcare
systems and tools, specifically EHR's, which can be
extended and are designed to accept HL7 V3
messages. This makes implementation of the
research very difficult.
The knowledge required to design the new
classes (Figure 2b) to extend the RIM is adapted
from PhysicalActivity and ExercisePlan schemas
defined by Schema.org. Schema.org (2012) is an
open source effort to define schemas/data structures
to describe any data, especially the data published on
the web. Schema.org describes, i.e., provide
schema/structure for numerous concepts (e.g.,
Person, ScholaryArticle, Book, Organization, etc.)
across various domains (e.g., Auto, Health, Books,
Biology, etc.). Currently, most of the data published
on the web is unstructured. The developers use the
Schema.org schemas to annotate (using Microdata or