An Ontology-Driven Information Model for Interoperability of Personal and Electronic Health Records

Personal Health Records allow patients to maintain their own health information and are viewed as an important tool for patient self-management. However, uptake of these systems has been hindered by the large burden placed on patients to record information or to arrange for information to be transferred from other clinical systems. The favored option of transferring information from other systems is hindered by a lack of semantic and syntactic interoperability between Personal and Electronic Health Record systems. In this position paper, we describe the ongoing development of an information model that uses an ontology to ensure semantic integrity between concepts recorded by both types of record systems, and HL7 standards to maintain equivalent structure and function. The information model acts as a middle layer between record systems and thus is not tied to any specific Personal and Electronic Health Record implementation