Healthcare data validation and conformance testing approach using rule-based reasoning

Abstract

HL7 community is profoundly involved in the development of standards in order to exchange, share and retrieve health related in-formation. FHIR is an emerging standard of HL7 that encourages use of JSON as a data serialization approach. Validation of healthcare data is crucial task because errors in data can result serious consequences. Currently there does not exist a validator that can validate and conform data as per FHIR. This paper presents an approach to validate health-care data embodied in JSON documents and to test its conformance with FHIR standard. We first developed Description Logic (DL) based schema of the FHIR. JSON data is then translated to RDF and we ap-ply rule-based reasoning to validate data. As verified by results, design of the validation algorithm ensures that validation step is performed in sub seconds and overall system remains efficient. Further, the rule based reasoning provides aid in identifying incompatibilities in data which should be fixed to bridge the gaps in achieving interoperability.