Project Participants:

Total Cost( € ): 2.957.604 €

Commission Funding( € ): 1.989.000 €

Project Main Goal(s):

Most of the health information systems today are proprietary and often only serve one specific department within a healthcare institute. To complicate the matters worse, a patient's health information may be spread out over a number of different institutes which do not interoperate. This makes it very difficult for clinicians to capture a complete clinical history of a patient.
On the other hand, the Web services model provides the healthcare industry with an ideal platform to achieve the difficult interoperability problems. Web services are designed to wrap and expose existing resources and provide interoperability among diverse applications.
However it has been generally agreed that Web services can be exploited to their full potential when their semantics are properly described and exploited. An essential element in defining the semantic of Web services is the domain knowledge. The healthcare information standards through standard bodies like HL7, CEN TC251, ISO TC215 and GEHR expose considerable domain knowledge through classifications, methodologies, terminologies, and controlled vocabularies which provide significant value in defining the semantics of healthcare Web services.
The objective of the ARTEMIS project is to develop a semantic Web services based interoperability framework for the health care domain.
The quantified specific objectives of the project are as follows:

• Providing interoperability of medical information systems through semantically enriched Web Services: The first objective of the project is to develop the infrastructure necessary to make medical information systems interoperable based on the Web services. For this purpose, generic Web service ontologies will be defined to describe both the service functionality and service messages. These ontologies will be based on the standards provided by the prominent healthcare information standard bodies like HL7, CEN TC251, ISO TC215 and GEHR. We will develop mechanism for storing semantic of medical Web services to UDDI and ebXML registries. To be able to discover the services stored in these registries based on their semantics, the ARTEMIS project will develop semantic querying mechanisms for the service registries. This objective includes developing mechanisms for publishing, discovering and invoking Web Services through their semantics in to Peer-to-Peer networks.
• Providing interoperability of Electronic Health Records through Web Services: In the health care domain, there are more than one standard to represent the same information, which in turn creates an interoperability problem. We take a different approach regarding the interoperability of medical information systems. We focus on processes in terms of Web services rather than recording and documentation of electronic health records. In other words, our approach allows a standard way of accessing the data rather than standardizing the documents. Then the interoperability problem among different healthcare standards will be handled at the semantic level through ontology mapping and semantic mediation.
• Providing an integration environment for disparate applications both within health care domain and with the organizations they communicate with: Healthcare is a many-to-many business. It is not only connecting a hospital to its branch clinics but to an array of internal and external agencies with disparate data sources and applications. Web services framework being proposed in this project leverages the strengths found in distributed computing and the integration of distributed applications. An example to where this framework can be easily leveraged is in communications among healthcare organizations, insurance entities and government agencies. Several independent processes can use a common Web service interface to asynchronously transmit insurance, encounter and billing data from a hospital's IT systems to an insurance company. These functionalities will be demonstrated by the two pilot applications of the ARTEMIS project.

Key issues: eHealth, Medical Information Systems, Semantic Web, Web Services, P2P Technologies

Technical approach:

The major research and development effort foreseen in this respect is to develop mechanisms to access Electronic Health Records in a standard way and to develop Peer-to-Peer Networks of healthcare organizations interoperating through semantically enriched Web Services. To achieve this objective the following basic components will be provided by the ARTEMIS project:

• Semantically enriched and secure P2P Web Service Environment for Medical Information Systems
• Semantic Wrapper for Web Service creation and composition that adapts the Medical Information System Applications
• Semantic mediation of different healthcare standards through ontology mediation
• Service based Access Layer for Electronic Health Records
• User friendly interfaces for the healthcare organizations, such as for publishing, discovering and composing Web Services

Expected achievements/impact:

Introducing Web services to the healthcare domain will bring many advantages:

• It will become possible to provide the interoperability of medical information systems through standardizing the access to data through WSDL and SOAP rather than standardizing documentation of electronic health records.
• Medical information systems suffer from proliferation of standards to represent the same data. Semantic mediation among the healthcare standards through ontology mediation will help with their interoperability.
• Web services will extend the healthcare enterprises by making their own services available to others.
• Web services will extend the life of the existing software by exposing previously proprietary functions as Web services.

Health care is characterized by shared and distributed decision making and management of care, requiring the communication of complex and diverse forms of information between a variety of clinical and other settings. These information needs of patients and healthcare providers should be anticipated and the information delivered in a timely and error-free manner to remote locations, maintaining communication, coordination and co-operation between users. There is a need to be able to build health information systems which are cost-effective and do not fall into obsolescence. By basing the interoperability of medical information systems on Web services it will be possible to improve the quality of care and reduce costs. Furthermore ARTEMIS project will provide for the interoperability at the semantic level through ontology mediation and facilitating resource discovery through peer-to-peer technology.

Prof. Dr. Asuman Dogac
Department of Computer Engineering
Director of Software Research & Development Center
Middle East Technical University
06531, Ankara, Turkey
email: asuman[at]srdc[.]metu[dot]edu[dot]tr
http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/~asuman
phone +90 - 312 - 210 5598 or +90 - 312 - 210 2076
fax: +90-312- 2101004 or +90 - 312 - 210 1259