ABSTRACT
This paper presents an approach to enable interoperability of the research data management system XNAT by the implementation of the HL7 standards framework Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). The FHIR implementation is realized as an XNAT plugin (Source code: https://github.com/somnonetz/xnat-fhir-plugin ), that allows easy adoption in arbitrary XNAT instances. The approach is demonstrated on patient data exchange between a FHIR reference implementation and XNAT.
Subject(s)
Health Level Seven/organization & administration , Medical Records Systems, Computerized/organization & administration , Neuroimaging/methods , Data Management , Electronic Health Records , Health Level Seven/standards , Humans , Medical Records Systems, Computerized/standards , Systems IntegrationABSTRACT
Healthcare communities are rapidly embracing Health Level 7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard as the next-generation messaging protocol to facilitate data interoperability. Implementation-friendly formats for data representation and compliance to widely adopted industry standards are among the strengths of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources that are accelerating its wide adoption. Research confirms the advantages of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources in increasing data interoperability in mortality reporting, genetic test sharing, and patient-generated data. However, few studies have investigated the application of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources in nursing-specific domains. In this study, a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources document was generated for a use case scenario in a home-based, pressure ulcer care setting. Study goals were to describe the step-by-step process of generating a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources artifact and to inform nursing communities about the advantages and challenges in representing nursing data with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. Overall, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources effectively represented the majority of the data included in the use case scenario. A few challenges that could potentially cause information loss were noted such as the lack of standardized concept codes for value encoding and the difficulty directly connecting an observation to a related condition. Continuous evaluations in diverse nursing domains are needed in order to gain a more thorough insight on potential challenges that Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources holds in representing nursing data.
Subject(s)
Electronic Health Records/standards , Health Information Interoperability , Home Care Services , Nursing Informatics , Pressure Ulcer/therapy , Delivery of Health Care , Health Level Seven/organization & administration , Humans , Systems IntegrationABSTRACT
The integration of applications is always the most important issue for a development team especially in the healthcare industry. In this paper, a Health Level 7 (HL7) engine system is proposed to solve HL7 challenges, which are associated with applying HL7 in healthcare organizations. This new HL7 engine has been implemented in a hospital as a solution for challenges we have faced. The engine shows great success overcoming known HL7 limitations.
