Archetype Alignment - A Two-level Driven Semantic Matching Approach to Interoperability in the Clinical Domain

Semantic interoperability between electronic health record systems and other information systems in the health domain implies agreement about the structure and the meaning of the information that is communicated. There are still a number of similar but different EHR system approaches. Some of the newer approaches adopt the two-layer model approach where a generic reference model is constrained by archetypes into valid clinical concepts which can be exchanged. The meaning of the concepts that are represented by an archetype can be conveyed by embedding codes from a commonly recognised terminology at appropriate points in the archetype. However, as the number of archetypes multiply it will become necessary to match archetypes from different sources to facilitate interoperability. This paper describes an approach that supports semantic interoperability between heterogeneous two-level health information systems by identifying similarities between archetypes. The approach identifies relationships between ontological terms which have been embedded in pairs of archetypes as a means of matching these terms. The matched terms can then in turn be used to identify similarities between archetypes. The limited contextual scope of an archetype simplifies this matching process.