Tema da Tese: Knowledge Engineering for Interoperable Electronic Health Records

Autor: Daniela Sofia Rijo Oliveira

Orientadores:  José Manuel Ferreira Machado; António Carlos da Silva Abelha

Data: 07/03/2022

Programa Doutoral: Programa Doutoral em Engenharia Biomédica

Abstract: 

The demand for more efficient healthcare delivery has prompted hospital institutions to become increasingly concerned with the evolution of their information systems over time, pursuing increased efficiency and interoperability among them on a global scale. Due to the large degree of variety in healthcare, an increasing number of methods and standards for standardized information and establishing critical levels of interoperability have emerged. The need of using standards to collect as much structured data as possible has become increasingly evident as a result of unstructured data’s inability to assist new knowledge discovery and the development of clinical decision support systems.

The abundance of healthcare software, typically as the consequence of lengthy and complex development, has aided some systems while hindering others. Nonetheless, the goal of this study is to create an artefact that enables the building of new healthcare information systems while preserving clinical and ethical validations, based on a novel paradigm. This new paradigm is guided by the openEHR standard, which reduces the concept of component-oriented software development and optimizes data structuring and centralization procedures in an ever-changing clinical environment. It was essential to conduct a needs assessment of various Portuguese healthcare institutions using research and requirements gathering techniques in order to design and develop an artefact that would fill those gaps. The research results were extremely promising, resulting in the development of a new demographic and clinical systems, as well as a new platform for managing the structures necessary to ensure the system’s operability. Additionally, the case studies conducted revealed that, although at different stages of maturity, the system was successfully implemented and accepted by the users.

Keywords: Electronic Health Record, Healthcare Information Systems, Interoperability, Multi-Agent Systems, OpenEHR