An HL7-Based Middleware for Exchanging Data and Enabling Interoperability in Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Data interoperability in the health sector is a current and important topic which has been the object of study in several research. Interoperability provides improved patient care quality, assists professionals in decision-making and enables healthcare organizations to remain competitive on the market. This work presents a cloud middleware based on the HL7 standard capable of encoding, storing, interoperating and integrating Electronic Health Record (EHR) data between different applications. Based on HL7 clinical document architecture, the software architecture of the proposed middleware is specified, a set of rules that maps relational data schemas to HL7 messages is described, and a tool that supports interoperability and integration of EHR data among health institutions is detailed. To validate the proposed solution, we used a real scenario of three health institutions located in the northern region of Brazil and results showed that all messages were encoded and interoperated among the health facilities.