Executing distributed healthcare and research processes - the highmed data sharing framework

Abstract

Several standards and frameworks have been described in existing literature and technical manuals that contribute to solving the interoperability problem. Their data models usually focus on clinical data and only support healthcare delivery processes. Research processes including cross organizational cohort size estimation, approvals and reviews of research proposals, consent checks, record linkage and pseudonymization need to be supported within the HiGHmed medical informatics consortium. The open source HiGHmed Data Sharing Framework implements a distributed business process engine for executing arbitrary biomedical research and healthcare processes modeled and executed using BPMN 2.0 while exchanging information using FHIR R4 resources. The proposed reference implementation is currently being rolled out to eight university hospitals in Germany as well as a trusted third party and available open source under the Apache 2.0 license.