Transferring Structured Medical Data from Hospital to Rehabilitation Facilities Using HL7 FHIR and openEHR

Abstract

Inter-institutional and inter-professional communication is based on the prompt and complete transmission of relevant health data, whereas conventional paper-based data transmission is often delayed and incomplete. One main objective of the CAEHR project is to optimize inter-sectoral information provision and to establish structured health data transfer from hospitals to rehabilitation facilities for TAVI patients. After a thorough requirement analysis conducted through structured interviews with medical experts from different fields, web portal instances were deployed at two university medical centres, providing data access to rehabilitation facilities involved in the patient care. Data transfer of medical and nursing data is extracted from the primary hospital information system and transformed to FHIR and openEHR format, respectively, via data mapping. After informed consent has been obtained, data is sent to the web portal. This portal is implemented on a Kubernetes system and hosted at university medical centres, allowing restricted external access. Questionnaires and assessment outcomes are sent back as follow-ups from rehabilitation facilities. The ongoing clinical study has included 142 patients so far. Despite different system architectures at the university medical centres, a unified concept with comparable data flows could be widely applied.