Home-centered health-enabling technologies and regional health information systems. An integration approach based on international standards.
BACKGROUND
This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Using Data from Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Homes in Electronic Health Records".


OBJECTIVE
In this paper, we present a prototype of a Home-Centered Health-Enabling Technology (HET-HC), which is able to capture, store, merge and process data from various sensor systems at people's home. In addition, we present an architecture designed to integrate HET-HC into an exemplary regional Health Information System (rHIS).


METHODS
rHIS are traditionally document-based to fit to the needs in a clinical context. However, HET-HC are producing continuous data streams for which documents might be an inappropriate representation. Therefore, the HET-HC could register placeholder-documents at rHIS. These placeholder-documents are assembled upon user-authenticated request by the HET-HC and are always up-to-date. Moreover, it is not trivial to find a clinical coding system for continuous sensor data and to make the data machine-readable in order to enhance the interoperability of such systems. Therefore, we propose the use of SNOCAP-HET, which is a nomenclature to describe the context of sensor-based measurements in health-enabling technologies.


RESULTS
We present an architectural approach to integrate HET-HC into rHIS. Our solution is the centralized registration of placeholder-documents with rHIS and the decentralized data storage at people's home.


CONCLUSIONS
We concluded that the presented architecture of integrating HET-HC into rHIS might fit well to the traditional approach of document-based data storage. Data security and privacy issues are also duly considered.
Matthias Gietzelt, Peter L. Reichertz Institute for Medical Informatics, University of Braunschweig - Institute of Technology and Hannover Medical School, Mühlenpfordtstr. 23, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany, E-mail: Matthias.Gietzelt@plri.de.
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M
Gietzelt
T
T
von Bargen
M
M
Kohlmann
M
M
Marschollek
J
J
Schwartze
B
B
Song
M
M
Wagner
K-H
KH
Wolf
R
R
Haux
D000368:Aged; D059019:Clinical Coding / Q000592:standards; D003199:Computer Systems; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000592:standards*; D063005:Health Information Systems / Q000592:standards*; D006699:Home Care Services / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology / Q000592:standards*; D012984:Software; D018511:Systems Integration; D009626:Terminology as Topic
Health-enabling technologies; regional health information systems; system integration