If we are to develop efficient, reliable and secure means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations, then a careful analysis of human actions will be needed. To address this need, the HL7 organization has proposed its Reference Information Model (RIM), which is designed to provide a comprehensive representation of the entire domain of healthcare centered around the phe...

This document presents the HiRES, Health informatics for Research, Education and Service, research project undertaken at the St. Mary’s Hospital Research Center, McGill University and its integration of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture standard for clinical teaching in the virtual environment. The achievement of a meaningful virtual clinical world for teaching, continuing clinical educati...

Background: Inter-organiza onal healthcare businesses are ruled by a huge set of policies: legal policies, organiza onal policies, medical policies, ethical policies, etc., which are quite sta c, pa ents policy and process, social and environmental condi ons, which are highly dynamic. In the context of a business case, those diff erent policies must be harmonized to enable privilege management ...

The Arden Syntax is an HL7 standard language for representing medical knowledge as logic statements. Despite nearly 2 decades of availability, Arden Syntax has not been widely used. This has been attributed to the lack of a generally available compiler to implement the logic, to Arden's complex syntax, to the challenges of mapping local data to data references in the Medical Logic Modules (MLMs...

In this paper we present INTERACCT (Integrating Entertainment and Reaction Assessment into Child Cancer Therapy), a multidisciplinary research project aiming at creating a communication tool for pediatric patients after cancer treatment with HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation) in after care. The communication platform should foster communication between patients and clinicians, but a...

OBJECTIVES Many groups are developing computer-interpretable clinical guidelines (CIGs) for use during clinical encounters. CIGs use "Task-Network Models" for representation but differ in their approaches to addressing particular modeling challenges. We have studied similarities and differences between CIGs in order to identify issues that must be resolved before a consensus on a set of common ...

Communicating genetic testing reports of a patient in a semantically interoperable way remains difficult. Most of the information is stored as non-communicable documents which cannot automatically be processed. The objective of the project was to obtain semantically interoperable genetic testing reports which could be used not only for communication purposes but also for secondary uses, for exa...

We begin with a brief explanation of how we view the current integration landscape. The paper then describes the mission and architecture of BizTalk Server, which is Microsoft’s integration server product. We conclude with some thoughts on the future of the business integration domain, which we believe is still in the early stages of its technology lifecycle. The range of target problems, proce...

Semantic interoperability, a prerequisite to eHealth projects, relies on sharing both information and knowledge models between information systems. Two of the standards of information models are HL7 v3 and the European norm, EN13606/OpenEHR. The paper compares both standards on a fragment of the prenatal medical record, the APGAR score. Two factors are compared: the formal representation of bot...

In this paper, we design a data transformer to transform Comma Separated Value (CSV) format into Health Level Seven (HL7) messages without losing syntax and semantics. The algorithm of the data transformer is similar to a generic parser for solving scheme-level mapping problems. It can be extended to transform non-uniform formats for exchanges among different hospital information systems. To sh...