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Review
. 2022;12(2):255-272.
doi: 10.1007/s12553-022-00639-w. Epub 2022 Jan 26.

Semantic interoperability in health records standards: a systematic literature review

Blanda Helena de Mello  1 , Sandro José Rigo  1 , Cristiano André da Costa  1 , Rodrigo da Rosa Righi  1 , Bruna Donida  1 , Marta Rosecler Bez  1 , Luana Carina Schunke  1
Affiliations
Review

Semantic interoperability in health records standards: a systematic literature review

Blanda Helena de Mello et al. Health Technol (Berl). 2022.

Abstract

The integration and exchange of information among health organizations and system providers are currently regarded as a challenge. Each organization usually has an internal ecosystem and a proprietary way to store electronic health records of the patient's history. Recent research explores the advantages of an integrated ecosystem by exchanging information between the different inpatient care actors. Many efforts seek quality in health care, economy, and sustainability in process management. Some examples are reducing medical errors, disease control and monitoring, individualized patient care, and avoiding duplicate and fragmented entries in the electronic medical record. Likewise, some studies showed technologies to achieve this goal effectively and efficiently, with the ability to interoperate data, allowing the interpretation and use of health information. To that end, semantic interoperability aims to share data among all the sectors in the organization, clinicians, nurses, lab, the entire hospital. Therefore, avoiding data silos and keep data regardless of vendors, to exchange the information across organizational boundaries. This study presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of semantic interoperability in electronic health records. We searched seven databases of articles published between 2010 to September 2020. We showed the most chosen scenarios, technologies, and tools employed to solve interoperability problems, and we propose a taxonomy around semantic interoperability in health records. Also, we presented the main approaches to solve the exchange problem of legacy and heterogeneous data across healthcare organizations.

Keywords: EHR; Health record; Health standard; Semantic interoperability; Systematic review.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of InterestNone.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
This graph presents, distributed by year of publication, the corpus of articles published during the range 2010 to September 2020
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The figure presents the entire selection process of the studies across the inclusion/exclusion criteria and quality assessment to conduct this systematic review
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
This graph presents the articles accepted after the selection process, showing the number of articles by published year
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Proposed taxonomy for semantic interoperability in health records
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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