Concept, Models and Implementations for Innovative Interoperable eHealth Solutions

Abstract

Over the time, the scope of those conferences has been ex-tended, meanwhile covering – as expressed in the motto of the this year's conference – concepts, models and practical implementations, but also testing and certification processes for innovative, interoperable eHealth solutions. The concept of interoperability has dramatically changed since the establishment of the Health Level 7 standard for of open communication between hospital organizational units in 1987 in the United States of America. For standardized electronic data interchange (EDI), the data representation at the application level, the 7th level of the ISO Open Sys-tems Interconnection stack, has been specified for informa-tion related to common events happening in hospital care and management processes [1]. The development was guided by the Marriam-Webster interoperability definition as the " abil-ity of a system (as a weapons system) to use the parts or equipment of another system " [2], and thereafter enhanced towards the IEEE definition as the " ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged " [3]. Both defi-nitions focus on communications between information and communication technology (ICT) systems. Impacted by the paradigm changes towards pervasive and ubiquitous health services based on personalized, preventive, predictive and participative medicine as well as technological innovations such a mobile technologies, micro-and nanotechnologies, cloud computing, big data and analytics, etc., we mean-while define interoperability as motivation, willingness, in-terest, knowledge, ability and skills to cooperate for meeting common business objectives. Simple EDI has been replaced by information exchange, nowadays followed by knowledge sharing. Such move requires that the consideration goes beyond ICT, including the real world business domains of manifold organizations and multiple disciplines as well as all possible actors such as persons, organizations, devices, appli-cations, and components. Here, domain-specific terminolo-gies/ontologies and their harmonization, but also business process modeling, management and optimization come into play [4, 5]. It is a challenge in open environments to guaran-tee the persistence of meaning throughout the entire devel-opment process from clinical models through their platform-independent informational representation, the computational aggregation and platform-specific implementation, thereby involving domain experts such as medical professionals, busi-ness people, informaticians and engineers. This Special Issue tackles the entire spectrum includ-ing EHR systems as the core application in eHealth en-vironments, interrelations between EHR systems and CDA repositories, CDA-based communication between services providers, the challenge of semantics keeping, implementa-tion guidelines, conformance testing, certification for guar-anteeing practical interoperability.