OntoHealth - Problem aware Semantic eHealth Services

Healthcare is  nowadays facing a huge number of patients worldwide mainly due to the growing aging population and population with chronic non-communicable diseases in western countries. This increase in patients implies (among others) an increase of the techniques and medical knowledge for diagnosis treatment that are needed which turns into a serious increase of the health care expenses. Hence, in order to stay financially feasible, there is a need to keep costs low while at the same time, level of quality in patient’s care should be guaranteed.

Information systems and specifically, the EHR (electronic health record) play an important role to achieve such an ambitious goal. The EHR allows closing the gap between institution-specific patient data and collecting patient’s health data which can be also exchanged between various healthcare providers. Support interoperability between EHR systems is then an important challenge and different standards have already been developed to address it. However, one problem that has not been tackled sufficiently is the functionality level of the EHR.  EHR systems are still monolithic systems from the functionality perspective. Hence, based on service orientation, OntoHealth aims to establish functionally flexible, standard-based EHR systems that allow answering respectively support solving clinical problems on an individual, case-specific basis.