LinkEHR

Abstract

Normalization of data is a prerequisite to achieve semantic interoperability in any domain. This is even more important in the healthcare sector due to the special sensitivity of medical data: data exchange must be done in a meaningful way, avoiding any possibility of misunderstanding or misinterpretation. In this chapter, we present the LinkEHR system for clinical data standardization and exchange. The LinkEHR platform provides tools that simplify meaningful sharing of electronic health records between different systems and organizations. Key contributions of LinkEHR are the development of a powerful medical concept, expressed in the form of archetypes, editing framework based on formal semantics capable of handling multiple electronic health record architectures, the definition of high-level non-procedural mappings to describe the relationship between archetype and legacy clinical data and the semi-automatic generation of XQuery scripts that transform legacy data into XML documents compliant with the underlying electronic health record data architecture and at the same time satisfy the constraints imposed by the archetype.