(Week 2) [T3-2] Knowledge Interchange Standards Flashcards
What is a standard, and where they can arise from? Explain also the issues.
An established norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task. Every time you screw in a light bulb or use the web, you are taking advantage of a standard. Standards are the key to interoperability.
Standards can arise from.
- De facto. Corporate standard that becomes generally accepted (e.g., Microsoft Office).
- Ad hoc. When needed. The effort of a particular community to address a specific problem (e.g., DICOM).
- Consensus. One or more communities come together to seek convergence (e.g., HL7, the Gene Ontology).
- Government mandate (e.g., electronic prescription in Portugal).
Some issues are the following.
- Voluntary in US, gov-funded in Europe.
- Early implementation. Acceptance is most critical in early stages.
- Conformance. Compliance + commitment to use.
- Certification.
In terms of EHR standars, explain the problems that we have and the goals that we want.
We have the following problems.
- Lack of support for continuity of care, across healthcare providers and countries, independent of EHR vendors.
- Missed hand-offs often dangerous for the patient.
- Hard to transform clinical data to computable data that can support the clinical research.
We want the following goals.
- Enable health records to move when patients move.
- Enable hospitals and general practice to share medication lists.
- Facilitate access to clinical data for research.
What is ISO13606?
ISO 13606 is a standard from the International Standardization Organization (ISO).
The objective is to define a rigorous and stable information architecture for communicating part or all of the EHR of a patient information between EHR systems, or between EHR systems and a centralized EHR data repository.
It may also be used by communication between EHR system and clinical applications or middleware components.
What is openEHR?
openEHR is an open standard specification that describes the management, storage, retrieval and exchange of health data in EHR.
What is the purpose of the data-interchange standard?
Permit one system (sender) to transmit to another system (receiver) all the data required to accomplish a specific communication, or transaction set.
Explain the OSI protocol stack.
Conceptual model with 7 layers (physical, link, network, transport, session, presentation, application) where each layer serves the layer above it. This model characterizes the communication functions of a computer system without regard to its underlying internal structure.
PLNTSPA
What is the difference between a terminology and a ontology?
Terminology is a body of terms used with a particular technical application in a subject of study.
Ontology (in computer science) is the representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between concepts, data and entities.
Why do we need terminological standards?
- To exchange medical information and knowledge (between countries,
organizations, computers and layers of healthcare). - Because clinical vocabulary must be strictly controlled.
Terminological standards in the EHR, + quality of clinical info, better healthcare.
Biomedical information systems must rely primarily on which type of data?
Coded data.
Which are the knowledge representation entities? And the layers?
- Literals (data values). ‘1.75m’
- Classes (collections of individuals). ‘Humans’
- Individuals (unique entities). ‘Miguel’
- Properties.
a. Data. Relate individuals to literals (e.g., height).
b. Object. Relate individuals to individuals (e.g., parent).
We can represent knowledge with RDF Triples. The statement syntax is the following. <subject> <predicate> <object>.</object></predicate></subject>
- Intensional knowledge. Annotations.
- Extensional knowledge.
a. Classification. ‘Heart’ is an ‘Organ’.
b. Other relations. ‘Heart’ is located in ‘Chest’.
c. Constraints. A ‘Body’ can have only one ‘Heart’.
