Concept-Based Exchange of Healthcare Information: The LinkEHR Approach

The most important requirement to support cooperative work among health professionals is the ability of sharing Electronic Healthcare Records. This is particularly difficult due to the intrinsic complexity and heterogeneity of the health domain. One approach to overcoming heterogeneity relies on the agreement on a set of domain-specific concepts that hide the particularities of the source EHRs. In this paper we present a software platform called Link EHR that empowers concept-based exchange of EHRs by bridging the gap between domain concepts expressed as archetypes and EHRs. Bridging the gap involves: i) editing domain concepts ii) mapping EHR data to reference information models and archetypes, iii) automatically creating data transformation programs to transform source data into archetype instances. We also present the utilization of the Link EHR platform in different settings and for different data exchange purposes.