Evaluating electronic health records interoperability

Abstract

Nowadays, ensuring clinical interoperability is considered a challenging situation for health practitioners. This is due to the development of an excessive amount of electronic health record (Ehr) softwares, which do not consider the integration of the interoperability modules at an early stage. Actually, many isolated solutions are present and are unable to exchange data with other systems. Instead of presenting new distinct solutions in terms of modeling, storage and processing techniques, we need to shed light and upgrade their current capabilities in order to end up with compatible platforms. In this paper, we formalize and assess the interoperability concept in regards to the health sector. Our approach is an extended version of the legacy Levels of Information Systems Interoperability Model (LISI), which was originally designed in the context of The Joint Task Force (JTF) system. Through this, we define representative metrics that have to be achieved within an Ehr, and classify them according to semantical, syntactic and technological attributes. The model revealed meaningful results in firstly measuring the level of the interoperability then generating a matrix profile able to display the main gaps and shortfalls need to be enhanced so as to attain a mature stage.