Sharing information and data across heterogeneous e-health systems

Information and data sharing across heterogeneous e-health systems, focusing on the management of patient care, have become the backbone of modern delivery of sustainable telemedicine services. Information and data available to healthcare practitioners in such environments range from patient's medical records, stored in repositories at places where patients have been treated, to a variety of information related to medical research, pharmaceutical products, or information stored within social networks of healthcare interest groups. This study sought to demonstrate two different approaches enabling the sharing of information/data across heterogeneous e-health systems: (1) Context-Aware Data Retrieval Architecture (CADRA), which secures the extraction and presentation of e-health information to users in requested format, and (2) Generic Ontology for Context Aware, Interoperable, and Data Sharing (Go-CID) software applications, which secure semantic interoperation across heterogeneous e-health data sources. Proof-of-concept was demonstrated in both cases, CADRA and Go-CID, to achieve understanding and building of knowledge about e-health environments. This study invites practical solutions for interoperable e-health systems.