Semantic Information Integration for Electronic Patient Records Using Ontology and Web Services Model

Electronic Patient Records (EPR) systems are developed proprietarily and often only serve one specific requirement within a healthcare institute. Heterogeneous EPR platforms introduce a problem in cross-system patient information exchange due to the lack of a uniform system and an accepted standard. This makes it very difficult for clinicians to capture the complete clinical history of a patient that may be spread out over a number of different healthcare institutes. This research proposes an architecture of semantic information integration for electronic patient records using ontology and Web Services models. The research exploits Web services to enable dynamic interoperability between different EPR systems. In order to enrich service discovery and solve semantic service discrepancies the concepts of service descriptions are semantically mapped with the Semantic Bridge Ontology (or SBO) expressed in OWL. Moreover, patient information obtained from each Web service is thus modeled onto domain ontology and integrated with the SBO to form the Ontology-based Patient Record Metadata. The proposed Ontology-based Patient Record Metadata provides a means for coping with the semantic service discrepancies and enables an inference engine to discover patient information dispersed over different healthcare systems.