Semantics Management for a Regional Health Information System in Italy by CTS2 and FHIR

Abstract

An infrastructure for the management of semantics is being developed to support the regional health information exchange in Veneto – an Italian region which has about 5 million inhabitants. Terminology plays a key role in the management of the information fluxes of the Veneto region, in which the management of electronic health record is given great attention. An architecture for the management of the semantics of laboratory reports has been set up, adopting standards by HL7. The system has been initially developed according to the common terminology service release 2 (CTS2) standard and, in order to overcome complexities of CTS2 is being revised according to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, which has been subsequently introduced. Aspects of CST2 and of FHIR have been considered in order to retain most suitable aspects of both. This integration can be regarded as most worthwhile.

Transforming Ontology Web Language Elements into Common Terminology Service 2 Terminology Resources

“…For this purpose, the concept of a terminology service was created to indicate a tool that allows us to provide access to terminology content through interfaces to read, query, maintain, and visualize the history of a specific terminology resource. The recent possible standard solution to define a terminology service, Application Programming Interface (API), is represented by the HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Terminology Service, already adopted in the literature [26][27][28][29]. The main limitation of the present approach is the possibility of establishing only hierarchical relations between concepts defined in the same code system and those mapped between concepts defined in different code systems.…”

“…In our work, we chose to address the problem of terminology management with a standard solution, specifically the Common Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2), because it is services-based and we have already used it in several scenarios [13,[24][25][26]31,32]. As a main advantage, the use of CTS2 standard provides specifications useful to implement a set of operations to completely manage all aspects of CTS2 resources.…”