Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Dec 21, 2022
Date Accepted: Dec 19, 2023
Electronic Health Record and Semantic Issues using FHIR: A Systematic Mapping Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
To facilitate semantic interoperability of data exchanged in health care, considerable resources have been deployed to improve the quality of shared clinical data by structuring and mapping it to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard with the objective of augmenting the quality of the information exchanged.
Objective:
The objective of this study is twofold: (1) survey recent research studies on FHIR semantic interoperability resources and terminologies; and (2) identify and classify the proposed approaches and contributions
Methods:
A systematic mapping study (SMS) is conducted to review research studies on the development and improvements to semantic interoperability using the FHIR standard over the 2012 to 2022 period and using ten electronic databases as sources of information
Results:
Sixty-eight (68) FHIR studies were selected and each analyzed to identify targeted semantic interoperability resources and terminologies. The proposed approaches were classified into six categories, namely: 1) mapping (25%); 2) terminology services (14%); 3) RDF/OWL based proposals (19%); 4) annotations proposals (15%); 5) machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) proposals (16%); and finally, 6) ontology-based proposals (11%). The trend shows that there is continued research in these five categories of solutions and that new and emerging annotations and ML/NLP proposals have been published in the last three years. This SMS also highlights the contributions of the selected studies from five technical perspectives: 1) framework/architecture proposals; 2) model proposals; 3) techniques proposals; 4) comparison services; and 5) tools proposals. The technical perspective most often encountered in these selected studies addresses the proposal of a framework or architectures as a solution to enable semantic interoperability
Conclusions:
This SMS provides a classification and the trends of the different solutions trying to resolve semantic interoperability using FHIR. The study results indicates that this topic is an active research domain. The findings can be used as guidelines by researchers and FHIR communities for future research or development.
Citation
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