Implementation of a Secured Cross-Institutional Data Collection Infrastructure by Applying HL7 FHIR on an Existing Distributed EMR Storages

Stud Health Technol Inform. 2020 Jun 26:272:155-158. doi: 10.3233/SHTI200517.

Abstract

A secure data collection infrastructure was implemented in which Health Level-7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperative Resources (FHIR) was applied according to standardized electronic medical record (EMR) storage. This infrastructure aims to facilitate rapid secondary use of EMR data in cross-institutional analyses on the basis of the Standardized Structured Medical Information eXchange (SS-MIX), Japan's domestic standard for EMR export. Existing EMR storage comprised enormous numbers of HL7 v2 messages; therefore, the user interface and database structure are basically defined according to the HL7 v2 data types and message structures, causing difficulty in rapid extraction for researches by clinicians. To solve this problem, we are trying to enhance some user interface with HL7 FHIR, which needs SS-MIX items to be mapped through HL7 FHIR resources. We investigated definition gaps between HL7 FHIR and SS-MIX messages, and report a developed user interface with HL7 FHIR to query against existing storage.

Keywords: Data Collection; Electronic Medical Records; HL7 FHIR; Privacy.

MeSH terms

  • Electronic Health Records*
  • Health Facilities
  • Health Information Exchange*
  • Health Level Seven
  • Japan