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Interoperability for medical information systems: an overview

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Abstract

As it is known to all, there is an imperative need for electronic transfer of healthcare information (patients’ records, laboratory analyses, medical images…) between healthcare organizations to improve the quality level they are offering. However, medical information systems in each organization are different from each other. These different systems compose a heterogeneous, distributed system with high complexity: there are a large number of healthcare related applications that support specific needs effectively but are isolated or incompatible. Thus medical information systems’ interoperability constitutes one of the main challenges of the IT society. Semantic interoperability in healthcare is important especially when all the varying types of data need to interact. Presented in this paper are the most relevant works to our knowledge, dealing with interoperability in medical information systems and a comparative study between the new proposed approaches and research trends to resolve heterogeneity issues.

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Notes

  1. Web site: http://www.skmtglossary.org.

  2. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): http ://www.w3.org.

  3. Web site: http://www.geneontology.org/.

  4. Web site: http://sig.biostr.washington.edu/projects/fm/.

  5. Web site: http://infectiousdiseaseontology.org/page/Main_Page.

  6. Web site: http://bioportal.bioontology.org.

  7. Web site: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

Abbreviations

CED::

clinical electronic documents

DICOM::

Digital Imaging and COMmunication in medecine

EHR::

Electronic Health Record

HL7::

Health Level 7

HSB::

Health Service Bus

LOINC::

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes

MIS::

Medical Information System

MRI::

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

OaaS::

Ontology as a Service

OLS::

Ontology Lookup Service (OLS)

PACS::

Picture Archiving and Communication System

RELMATM::

Regenstrief LOINC Mapping Assistant

SNOMED:

CT: Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms

SOA::

Software Oriented Architecture

SWS::

Semantic Web Services

VPN::

Virtual Private Network

P2P::

Peer-to-Peer

WWP::

Web Workflow Peer

WWPD::

Web Workflow Peer Directory

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ReDCAD Laboratory, National School of Engineers of Sfax, BP1173, 3038, Sfax, Tunisia

    Randa Hammami, Hatem Bellaaj & Ahmed Hadj Kacem

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  1. Randa Hammami
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  2. Hatem Bellaaj
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  3. Ahmed Hadj Kacem
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Correspondence to Randa Hammami.

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Hammami, R., Bellaaj, H. & Hadj Kacem, A. Interoperability for medical information systems: an overview. Health Technol. 4, 261–272 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-014-0085-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-014-0085-8

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