TOOL-ASSISTED KNOWLEDGE TO HL7 v3 MESSAGE TRANSLATION

Abstract

<p>Healthcare System Integration is an area of utmost importance in the overall eHealth<br />strategy of Ontarios provincial government as well as the federal government of Canada. A large body of researchers from various governmental and non-governmental<br />organizations are actively engaged in delivering solutions to integrate disparate healthcare information systems. The overall goal of these efforts is to provide a provincewide and nation-wide unified view of clinical information to healthcare practitioners, thereby enabling them to deliver accurate and timely services to the general public in a cost-efficient manner.<br />While the need for health information integration is clear, due to inherent complexities<br />of the healthcare domain as well as health information standards such as Health Level 7 (HL7), completion of such projects within budget and time is not an easy task. The goal of this study is to understand and analyze the information architecture behind HL7 version 3 (HL7 v3) with the aim of simplifying healthcare system integration process. In this thesis, we present a novel framework for extracting HL7 v3 messages to represent healthcare transactions that take place in an integration scenario. We have developed a prototype tool based on semantic web (SW) technologies to support our approach. We also present three healthcare case studies to demonstrate our solution.</p>