Semantically inspired electronic healthcare records

Abstract

The adoption of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) holds the key for the success of next generation intelligent healthcare systems to improve the quality of healthcare and patient safety by facilitating the exchange of critical patient's episodic information among different stakeholders. The primary and secondary care healthcare systems store the episodic information for future reuse and for auditing purposes. The conventional healthcare information management systems for primary and secondary care are expected to be able to communicate and exchange complex medical knowledge (often expressed in numerous languages in different parts of the world) in an efficient and unequivocal way. For the purpose of this research, we present a novel technique to transform conventional patients' data into OWL-based Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) which addresses the issues of interoperability, flexibility, and scalability through the utilization of ontology inspired framework. Using ontologies is a cost effective and pragmatic solution to implementing a shift from simple patient interviewing systems to more intelligent systems in the primary and secondary care. The Patient Semantic Profile specifically developed for generating EHRs has been validated using a sample of real patients' data acquired from the Raigmore Hospital's RACPC (Rapid Access Chest Pain Clinic). © 2012 Springer-Verlag.