A deployment and Research Roadmap for Semantic Interoperability: the EU semantic health project.

The purpose of this EU funded project is to describe a short and medium term Research and Deployment Roadmap for Semantic Interoperability in e-health. It started by defining 4 levels and 3 dimensions for Semantic Interoperability. The vision is to reconcile the needs for the direct patient care safety, biomedical and clinical research and for public health by the reuse of direct care data: from gene to individuals and populations. The methodology is presented and preliminary results and milestones for the short and the long term are set. We conclude by statements on the main characteristics and needs of the roadmap to sustain better health for individual and populations in the changing EU health care systems.

Barriers integrating dedicated software for quality management in pain centres.

OBJECTIVES: Explore the feasibility of integrating a dedicated pain centre information system as part of a quality management network with a number of different Hospital Information Systems. MATERIAL & METHODS: A systematic approach integrating and implementing the system in 15 selected hospital organisations (a nationwide 15% non-random sample). RESULTS: Hospitals have widely varying policies on integration and implementation of additional clinically required 3rd party software. Financial and organisational constraints are considerable. Partial data integration could be realised in one third of the hospital organisations within the project timeframe. Linking with various types of Hospital Information Systems from the same or different vendors caused no technical difficulties. The total effort required, however, varies considerably; different versions of a HIS of the same vendor require substantial additional effort. IT departments hardly use standard rules to accept this type of systems, causing substantial increases in completion time for installation. CONCLUSIONS: Although it is feasible to integrate a local departmental system as required (download of general patient, provider and referrer data basically, and also upload of certain data) the workload of scaling to the national level is considered far beyond what is reasonable for a national quality management network for pain. Alternatives for recording and capturing data (which comply with the requirements of the national system) are currently being explored.

An Ontology driven collaborative development for biomedical terminologies: from the French CCAM to the Australian ICHI coding system.

The CCAM French coding system of clinical procedures was developed between 1994 and 2004 using, in parallel, a traditional domain expert's consensus method on one hand, and advanced methodologies of ontology driven semantic representation and multilingual generation on the other hand. These advanced methodologies were applied under the framework of an European Union collaborative research project named GALEN and produced a new generation of biomedical terminology. Following the interest in several countries and in WHO, the GALEN network has tested the application of the ontology driven tools to the existing reduced Australian ICHI coding system for interventions presently under investigation by WHO to check its ability and appropriateness to become the reference international coding system for procedures. The initial results are presented and discussed in terms of feasibility and quality assurance for sharing and maintaining consistent medical knowledge and allowing diversity in linguistic expressiveness of end users.