Project Overview

The same patient visits different health center for many reasons, such as to treat another medical specialty or due to geographic displacement. Access patient’s medical history requires data sharing among healthcare centers. The ability to exchange data among computational systems is called data interoperability. Besides technical issues, clinical data interoperability is moreover hampered by ethical and security issues, by the absence of consensus about standards and terminology, and by the use of outdated and closed technology. The project aims to enable interoperability of arbitrary clinical information systems exploring semantic aspects via queries.

Proposed architecture for semantic interoperability

 

People involved:

Jacqueline Midlej do Espírito Santo

Person in charge:

Claudia Bauzer Medeiros

 


To allow physicians and health researchers recover clinical data from heterogeneous sources, taking advantage of the knowledge from medical terminologies and ontologies. Our architecture for clinical data interoperability has two facets: mediator-based structure and semantic linkage with knowledge bases. These facets allow integrated access to clinical data, designing queries driven by clinical context and exploring semantics on query processing.

The project has been applied in the information systems of two health center at Unicamp, Hospital das Clínicas (HC) and Hemocentro, concerning clinical data about medical appointments, surgeries, laboratory and image tests, drug administrations, hospitalizations, chemotherapies, and blood donations and transfusions.

The Hospital das Clínicas is one of the biggest hospitals in Brazil, with 44 medical specialties, 10 thousand people attended per day, and 5 thousand tests and exams performed per day. Its clinical and administrative information is distributed over 19 systems and many different DBMS. Hemocentro is a hemopathy specialized center having a single information system. It attends 1500 patients per month and receives 70 thousand blood donations per year.

Santo, Jacqueline Midlej do Espírito; Medeiros, Claudia Bauzer.

Semantic Interoperability of Clinical Data (Conference)

Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics (LNBI) - Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Data Integration in the Life Sciences, 10649 Luxemburgo, Luxemburgo, 2017.