Integrating data and network standards into an interoperable e-Health solution

Abstract

E-health has raised a great deal of expectations on improving the quality of health services while simultaneously enabling health services cost reductions. To advance towards those visions, it is imperative to gain the trust of the involved stakeholders, doctors and other medical personnel, patients, families, health care providers and regulators. Even though one critical requirement is interoperability among the various systems involved, currently existing solutions are still vertical silos to a large extent. In this paper, we present an E-health solution that results from the integration of components that comply with rising standards at the various levels of the ICT infrastructure: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications for interconnecting devices and services, Health Level 7 (HL7) for communicating with health platforms and openEHR for data semantics, storing and making data available. Concretely, we provide an interoperable and extensible e-health service following these three uprising standards and present the architecture design. We map the service to the various components of the infrastructure building blocks, thus demonstrating how the integration can be successfully accomplished. We are currently developing a prototype solution to be used in a pilot project with 15 elders.