Usability of HL7 and SNOMED CT standards in Java Persistence API environment

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2014:197:109-13.

Abstract

Due to the need for an efficient way of communication between the different stakeholders of healthcare (e.g. doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, patients etc.), the possibility of integrating different healthcare systems occurs. However, during the integration process several problems of heterogeneity might come up, which can turn integration into a difficult task. These problems motivated the development of healthcare information standards. The main goal of the HL7 family of standards is the standardization of communication between clinical systems and the unification of clinical document formats on the structural level. The SNOMED CT standard aims the unification of the healthcare terminology, thus the development of a standard on lexical level. The goal of this article is to introduce the usability of these two standards in Java Persistence API (JPA) environment, and to examine how standard-based system components can be efficiently generated. First, we shortly introduce the structure of the standards, their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we present an architecture design method, which can help to eliminate the possible structural drawbacks of the standards, and makes code generating tools applicable for the automatic production of certain system components.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Electronic Health Records / standards*
  • Guidelines as Topic*
  • Health Information Systems / standards*
  • Health Level Seven / standards*
  • Internationality
  • Programming Languages
  • Software*
  • Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine*
  • User-Computer Interface