Addressing Semantic Interoperability, Privacy and Security Concerns in Electronic Health Records

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) in healthcare has the potential of reducing medical errors, minimizing healthcare cost and significantly improving the healthcare service quality. However, there is a barrier in healthcare data and information exchange between various healthcare systems due to the lack of interoperability. Also, with the implementation of EHR system, there are security and privacy concerns in the storage and transferring data entities. The healthcare interoperability problem remains an issue of further research and this paper proposes a semantic interoperability framework for solving this problem by allowing healthcare stakeholders and organizations (doctors, clinics, hospitals)using various healthcare standards to exchange data and its semantics, which can be understood by both machines and humans. Moreover, the proposed framework takes into consideration the security aspects in the semantic interoperability framework by utilizing data encryption and other technologies to secure the communication for the EHR information while ensuring real time data availability.