White Paper: Towards interoperable health data

This third White Paper produced by InteropEHRate partners addresses challenges related to European health data exchange across institutions, regions, and countries. It also draws its arguments from a series of meetings held with experts in semantics and other fields.

The paper targets a heterogeneous readership that includes technologists and healthcare practitioners. More specifically, it is oriented towards hospital chief information officers (CIOs) and data managers, decision-makers and application developers from the healthcare information technology (IT) industry, and clinicians and medical directors concerned about the reuse of health data produced in clinical settings.

First, the paper provides an overview of the problems of data heterogeneity and interoperability, which are especially complex due to the breadth and the ever-evolving spread of the health data domain. Second, it presents a solution based on an in-depth and exhaustive analysis of data, made possible through innovative semi-automated methodologies and tools developed in the framework of the InteropEHRate project. Third, it shows how these tools and methods were applied in complex clinical and research scenarios requiring cross-border data interoperability. Fourth, the paper outlines some conditions that are needed in order to be able to exploit health data. Last but not least, conclusions are reached.