Ontologising Interaction Behavior for Service-Oriented Enterprise Healthcare Integration

In this paper we analyse the HL7 healthcare standard as an integration mechanism to connect service-oriented healthcare enterprises. Healthcare enterprises differ in their process model even if they follow same standard. This difference is due to the way in which healthcare is influenced by various stakeholders within regional clinical practices. Thus the design of the interaction behaviour i.e., HL7 interactions, of communicating healthcare enterprises is subject to local implementation. We present an example scenario that shows how heterogeneous process models evolve, even if healthcare care enterprises follow a similar standard such as HL7. We present an approach that enables the “separation of the process layer” from HL7 profiles to enable control and to resolve the heterogeneity of the enterprise interaction behavior. We apply semantics on top of HL7 profiles to resolve ambiguity and heterogeneity in the service and process definitions of HL7 compliant healthcare enterprises. We propose an integration platform called PPEPR: Plug and Play Electronic Patient Records, which is based on the principals of semantic Service-Oriented Architecture (sSOA).