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Process interoperability in healthcare systems with dynamic semantic web services

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Abstract

Healthcare systems are very complex due to extreme heterogeneity in their data and processes. Researchers and practitioner need to make systems interoperable and integrate for the benefit of all the stakeholders including hospitals, clinicians, medical support staff, and patients. The broader goal of interoperability can only be achieved when standards are practiced.Two different healthcare systems can earn HL7 conformance and compliance but at the same time can be incompatible for interoperability because of varying implementation of HL7 interaction model. This is mainly because workflows in healthcare systems are very complex. Interoperability on one hand requires flexible mechanism for the mapping of business processes to a standard, HL7 in our example. On the other hand it requires deeper understanding of the standard interaction model and gaps created by their incompatible implementations. In this paper we propose a novel technique of dynamically creating semantic web services as overlay on top of the existing services. We used Web Service Modeling Framework as an underlying architecture for HL7 process artifacts implementation as semantic web services. These semantic services are mapped to our proposed interaction ontology. Integrated reasoning mechanism provides necessary execution semantics for more effective and seamless end-to-end communication.The prototype we tested on different processes from the laboratory domain at a local diagnostic laboratory with uninterrupted process flow. The scenario of Result Query Placer interaction flow and its associated process artifacts are executed for the proof of concept.The proposed solution complements the existing data interoperability in HL7 and leads to semantic process interoperability. The achievement of semantic interoperability results in timely delivery of healthcare services to patients saving precious lives.

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Notes

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  4. http://www.sparxsystems.com/.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency)” (NIPA-2012-(H0301-12-2001)).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Seocheon-dong, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, 446-701, Republic of Korea

    Wajahat Ali Khan, Maqbool Hussain, Muhammad Afzal & Sungyoung Lee

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Khalid Latif & Farooq Ahmad

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  1. Wajahat Ali Khan
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  2. Maqbool Hussain
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  3. Khalid Latif
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  4. Muhammad Afzal
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  5. Farooq Ahmad
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  6. Sungyoung Lee
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Correspondence to Sungyoung Lee.

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Khan, W.A., Hussain, M., Latif, K. et al. Process interoperability in healthcare systems with dynamic semantic web services. Computing 95, 837–862 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-012-0239-3

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