Semantic Interoperability, Privacy and Security Concerns in Electronic Health Records: Survery and Model Proposal

Abstract

the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in healthcare has the potential of reducing medical errors, minimizing healthcare cost and significantly improving the healthcare service quality. However, there is a barrier in healthcare data and information exchange between various healthcare systems due to lack of interoperability. Also, with the implementation of EHR system, there are security and privacy concerns during the storage and transferring data entities. The healthcare interoperability problem remains an issue of further research and this paper proposes a semantic interoperability framework for solving the healthcare interoperability problem by enabling various healthcare standards from various healthcare entities (doctors, clinics, hospitals) to exchange data and its semantics which can be understood by both machines and humans. Moreover, the proposed framework takes into consideration the security aspects in the semantic interoperability by utilizing data encryption and other technologies in the proposed framework to secure the communication for the EHR information while ensuring real time data availability.