ContSOnto: A Formal Ontology for Continuity of Care

The global pandemic over the past two years has reset societal agendas by identifying both strengths and weaknesses across all sectors. Focusing in particular on global health delivery, the ability of health care facilities to scale requirements and to meet service demands has detected the need for some national services and organisations to modernise their organisational processes and infrastructures. Core to requirements for modernisation is infrastructure to share information, specifically structural standardised approaches for both operational procedures and terminology services. Problems of data sharing (aka interoperability) is a main obstacle when patients are moving across healthcare facilities or travelling across border countries in cases where emergency treatment is needed. Experts in healthcare service delivery suggest that the best possible way to manage individual care is at home, using remote patient monitoring which ultimately reduces cost burden both for the citizen and service provider. Core to this practice will be advancing digitalisation of health care underpinned with safe integration and access to relevant and timely information. To tackle the data interoperability issue and provide a quality driven continuous flow of information from different health care information systems semantic terminology needs to be provided intact. In this paper we propose and present ContSonto a formal ontology for continuity of care based on ISO 13940:2015 ContSy and W3C Semantic Web Standards Language OWL (Web Ontology Language). ContSonto has several benefits including semantic interoperability, data harmonization and data linking. It can be use as a base model for data integration for different healthcare information models to generate knowledge graph to support shared care and decision making.