Key Issues of Technical Interoperability Solutions in eHealth and the RIDE Project

One of the key problems in healthcare informatics is the lack of interoperability among different healthcare information systems. Interoperability can be investigated in different categories in the eHealth domain, such as the interoperability of the messages exchanged between healthcare applications, interoperability of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs), interoperability of patient identifiers, coding terms, clinical guidelines and healthcare business processes. Furthermore, all these categories can be investigated in two major layers: syntactic interoperability layer and the semantic interoperability layer. Syntactic interoperability (which we term as messaging layer), involves the ability of two or more systems to exchange information. Syntactic interoperability involves several layers: network and transport layer (such as Internet), application protocol layer (such as HTTP or email), messaging protocol and message format layer (such as ebXML messaging or SOAP), and the sequencing of the messages. Syntactic interoperability guarantees the message to be delivered but does not guarantee that the content of the message will be machine processable at the receiving end. To guarantee message content interoperability, either the message content should conform to a single machin