I have been following OpenEHR for some time?Have found it difficult
to get a grasp?This Thesis is easy to read and clarifies a lot of
points for me?Interesting ideasWell done!
Richard Hosking ?
----- Original Message -----
From: "For openEHR clinical discussions"
To:"For openEHR clinical discussions"
Cc:"For openEHR technical discussions" , "For openEHR implementation
discussions"
Sent:Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:24:59 +0000
Subject:Re: PhD thesis online: Scalability and Semantic Sustainability
in Electronic Health Record Systems
Erik,? Congrats, it must feel really nice to be able to reach this
point. Best of luck for the defense :)
Best regards Seref
On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Erik Sundvall wrote:
Hi!
My thesis entitled "Scalability and Semantic Sustainability in
Electronic Health Record Systems" is now?available?online. It
contains many openEHR-related papers and discussions (see abstract
included below).
Permanent link to electronic version of the
thesis:?http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-87702 [2]
Public PhD defence will be held the 15:th of February, in
Link?ping, Sweden. Faculty opponent: prof. Dipak Kalra, UCL.
Temporary event-information
page:?http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/2013/phd/ [3] (That page also
contains a form where you have the possibility to indicate interest in
online participation or in getting a recording.)
Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erik.sundvall at liu.se [4] http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ [5]? Tel:
+46-13-286733
Abstract This work is a small contribution to the greater goal of
making software systems used in healthcare more useful and
sustainable. To come closer to that goal, health record data will need
to be more computable and easier to exchange between systems.?
Interoperability refers to getting systems to work together and
semantics concerns the study of meanings. If Semantic interoperability
is achieved then information entered in one information system is
usable in other systems and reusable for many purposes. Scalability
refers to the extent to which a system can gracefully grow by adding
more resources. Sustainability refers more to how to best use
available limited resources. Both aspects are important.?
The main focus and aim of the thesis is to increase knowledge about
how to support scalability and semantic sustainability. It reports
explorations of how to apply aspects of the above to Electronic Health
Record (EHR) systems, associated infrastructure, data structures,
terminology systems, user interfaces and their mutual boundaries.?
Using terminology systems is one way to improve computability and
comparability of data. Modern complex ontologies and terminology
systems can contain hundreds of thousands of concepts that can have
many kinds of relationships to multiple other concepts. This makes
visualization challenging. Many visualization approaches designed to
show the local neighbourhood of a single concept node do not scale
well to larger sets of nodes. The interactive TermViz approach
described in this thesis, is designed to aid users to navigate and
comprehend the context of several nodes simultaneously. Two
applications are presented where TermViz aids management of the
boundary between EHR data structures and the terminology system SNOMED
CT.
The amount of available time from people skilled in health informatics
is limited. Adequate methods and tools are required to develop,
maintain and reuse health-IT solutions in a sustainable way. Multiple
levels of modelling including a fixed reference model and another
layer of flexible reusable ?archetypes? for domain specific data
structures, is an approach with that aim used in openEHR and the ISO
13606 standard. This approach, including learning, implementing and
managing it, is explored from different angles in this thesis. An
architecture applying Representational State Transfer (REST) to
archetype-based EHR systems, in order to address scalability, is
presented. Combined with archetyping this architecture also aims at
enabling a sustainable way of continuously evolving multi-vendor EHR
solutions. An experimental open source implementation of it, aimed for
learning and prototyping, is also presented.?
Manually changing database structures used for storage every time new
versions of archetypes and associated data structures are needed is
likely not a sustainable activity. Thus storage systems that can
handle change with minimal manual interventions are desirable. Initial
explorations of performance and scalability in such systems are also
reported.
Graphical user interfaces focused on EHR navigation, time-perspectives
and highlighting of EHR content are also presented ? illustrating
what can be done with computable health record data and the presented
approaches.?
Desirable aspects of semantic sustainability have been discussed,
including: sustainable use of limited resources (such as available
time of skilled people), and reduction of unnecessary risks. A
semantic sustainability perspective should be inspired and informed by
research in complex systems theory, and should also include striving
to be highly aware of when and where technical debt is being built up.
Semantic sustainability is a shared responsibility.
The combined results presented contribute to increasing knowledge
about ways to support scalability and semantic sustainability in the
context of electronic health record systems. Supporting tools,
architectures and approaches are additional contributions.
_______________________________________________
openEHR-clinical mailing list
openEHR-clinical at lists.openehr.org [6]
http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-clinical_lists.openehr.org
[7]
Links:
------
[1] mailto:erik.sundvall at liu.se
[2] http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-87702
[3] http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/2013/phd/
[4] mailto:erik.sundvall at liu.se
[5] http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/
[6] mailto:openEHR-clinical at lists.openehr.org
[7]
http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-clinical_lists.openehr.org
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