Article,
Integrating and Querying Patient’s Medical Data
ACEEE International Journal of Information Technology, 3 (3): 11 (September 2013)
Abstract
Although the original purpose of the HL7’s
Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) was to deliver clinical
summaries between healthcare organizations, nowadays they
are increasingly used for collecting patients’ health
documentation from various healthcare providers. Usually the
collected CCD documents are organized into hierarchical
structures that simplify the search of documents, e.g., grouping
together the documents by episode, clinical specialty or time
period. Yet each clinical document is stored as a stand-alone
artifact, meaning that each document is complete and whole
in itself. Considering each document only as a complete and
a whole in itself also has its drawback: the efficient usage of
patients’ health documentation often is data centric, meaning
that data should be extracted from various documents and
then integrated according to specific criteria. Processing such
queries requires the integration of the data of the CCD
documents. In this paper, we present two ontology-based
methods for the integration. Which of the methods is
appropriate depends on whether the header or the whole CCD
documents are based on the HL7 RIM.
