Papers by Shahzeb Iftikhar
One of the challenges faced nowadays by the healthcare industry is semantic interoperability. It ... more One of the challenges faced nowadays by the healthcare industry is semantic interoperability. It is the ability of a healthcare system to share information and have that information properly interpreted by the receiving system in the same sense as intended by the transmitting system. Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0) provides the enabling technologies to achieve semantic interoperability. Web Services, as a catalyst in this process, provide seamless communication of information between healthcare systems thus providing better access to patient information and improved healthcare. Semantic technologies are emerging and several applications ranging from business process management to information security have demonstrated encouraging prospects of its benefits. Role of semantics is also very vital for achieving interoperability in sharing of health records. The aim of this chapter is to establish research and development in the domain of Health Level 7 (HL7) as an application to provide e-health services for the diverse communities. Through this research process, we intend to develop HL7 interface software for healthcare information systems that will provide semantic interoperability between the communicating medical systems. The objective is to facilitate e-health services that are interoperable among a number of domains in this field such as laboratory, patient administration and pharmacy. After its development and testing in the end-user environment, this software solution will be made publicly available under an open-source license. Due to its cutting-edge nature, this software solution has the potential of establishing an international repute for Pakistan in the highly profitable and potent healthcare industry. Since healthcare is a sensitive and critical area as it involves life of human beings, this project will be conducted in a manner to ensure that the resulting software is secure, reliable and maintainable. This mostly involves research and implementation challenges. Some initiatives are already underway such as Health Services Specification Project (HSSP). It is a joint-venture of HL7 and Object Management Group (OMG), providing standardized service interface specifications. Following the traces of HSSP, our proposal is aimed to design and implement concrete SOA model. The ultimate goal is to define the HL7 Web services as Semantic Web
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Papers by Shahzeb Iftikhar