Summary
Objectives: Several standards applied to the healthcare domain support semantic inter-operability.
These standards are far from being completely adopted in health information system
development, however. The objective of this paper is to provide a method and suggest
the necessary tooling for reusing standard health information models, by that way
supporting the development of semantically interoperable systems and components.
Methods: The approach is based on the definition of UML Profiles. UML profiling is a formal
modeling mechanism to specialize reference meta-models in such a way that it is possible
to adapt those meta-models to specific platforms or domains. A health information
model can be considered as such a meta-model.
Results: The first step of the introduced method identifies the standard health information
models and tasks in the software development process in which healthcare information
models can be reused. Then, the selected information model is formalized as a UML
Profile. That Profile is finally applied to system models, annotating them with the
semantics of the information model. The approach is supported on Eclipse-based UML
modeling tools. The method is integrated into a comprehensive framework for health
information systems development, and the feasibility of the approach is demonstrated
in the analysis, design, and implementation of a public health surveillance system,
reusing HL7 RIM and DIMs specifications.
Conclusions: The paper describes a method and the necessary tooling for reusing standard healthcare
information models. UML offers several advantages such as tooling support, graphical
notation, exchangeability, extensibility, semi-automatic code generation, etc. The
approach presented is also applicable for harmonizing different standard specifications.
Keywords
Integrated health care systems - standards - semantic interoperability - profiles
- reusability - UML - HL7 - Java components
