Towards an Architecture for the Interoperability of Hospital Information Systems in Burkina Faso

The successful introduction of ICTs into medical practice is a key factor in improving the performance of any health system for both patients and healthcare professionals. In Burkina Faso, many hospital information systems (HIS) have been developed and are already widely used in large health centers with proven efficiency. To improve the quality of patient care, these hospital information systems should exchange information. Interoperability is one of the privileged ways to improve the integration of different systems because nowadays a HIS is no longer just a single monolithic software system, which is run on a single machine. This paper presents a semantic interoperability architecture, which is based on a mediation approach. The mediator implements local domain ontologies for each HIS, a knowledge base, and a referential ontology which is used as a semantic repository and web services.