title: Ontological modeling of electronic health information exchange.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Investments of resources to purposively improve the movement of information between health system providers are currently made with imperfect information. No inventories of system-level electronic health information flows currently exist, nor do measures of inter-organizational electronic information exchange.
  
  
  METHODS
  Using Protégé 4, an open-source OWL Web ontology language editor and knowledge-based framework, we formalized a model that decomposes inter-organizational electronic health information flow into derivative concepts such as diversity, breadth, volume, structure, standardization and connectivity.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The ontology was populated with data from a regional health system and the flows were measured. Individual instance's properties were inferred from their class associations as determined by their data and object property rules. It was also possible to visualize interoperability activity for regional analysis and planning purposes. A property called Impact was created from the total number of patients or clients that a health entity in the region served in a year, and the total number of health service providers or organizations with whom it exchanged information in support of clinical decision-making, diagnosis or treatment. Identifying providers with a high Impact but low Interoperability score could assist planners and policy-makers to optimize technology investments intended to electronically share patient information across the continuum of care. Finally, we demonstrated how linked ontologies were used to identify logical inconsistencies in self-reported data for the study.
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Canada; School of Business & Economics/Health Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Electronic address: jmcmurray@wlu.ca.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: McMurray
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Canada; David R Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: McKillop
authors.affiliation: School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, Canada; David R Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003625:Data Collection; D016208:Databases, Factual; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D066275:Health Information Exchange; D063005:Health Information Systems; D006291:Health Policy; D020407:Internet; D007802:Language; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000379:methods*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software
keywords: Data quality; Health information exchange; Health system performance; Interoperability; Ontological model