Semantic Interoperability Between Clinical Research and Healthcare: The PONTE Approach

The adoption of ICT technologies in healthcare for recording patients’ health events and progression in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and Clinical Information Systems (CLIS) has led to a rapidly increasing volume of data which is, in general, distributed in autonomous heterogeneous databases. The secondary use of such data (commonly anonymised for privacy reasons) for purposes other than healthcare (such as patient selection for clinical trials) comprises an emerging trend. However, this trend encapsulates a great challenge; semantic interlinking of two different, yet highly related, domains (in terms of semantics) i.e., clinical research and healthcare. This paper aims at presenting an analysis of the heterogeneity issues met in this effort and describing the semantically-enabled multi-step process followed within the PONTE project for achieving the interlinking of these two domains for the provision of the size of the eligible patients for participation in a trial at the cooperating sites.