The Representational Challenge of Integration and Interoperability in Transformed Health Ecosystems

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Systems Engineering
• Precision Medicine

Background:

• Global health and social care systems are transforming towards personalized, preventive, predictive, and participative precision medicine (5PM).
• This transformation is driven by advanced technologies like AI, nanotechnologies, and edge computing.
• Existing systems face challenges in communication and cooperation due to diverse methodologies, languages, and ontologies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a formalized representation of the transformed health ecosystem for improved design and management.
• To enable consistent communication and cooperation among diverse actors in the health domain.
• To advance the integration of data, knowledge, and representational artifacts across different domains.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing a system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based, and policy-driven approach.
• Applying ISO/IEC 21838 Top Level Ontologies standard for interrelating business viewpoints.
• Transforming outcomes into implementable solutions using ISO/IEC 10746 Open Distributed Processing Reference Model.

Main Results:

• Development and standardization of ISO 23903 Interoperability and Integration Reference Architecture.
• Detailed formal representation of ecosystems and their development processes, including practical deployment examples.
• Solutions for correct systems and standards integration, ensuring interoperability.

Conclusions:

• The standardized architecture enables correct and consistent formal representation of all development process components.
• Achieved interoperability and integration of existing representational artifacts, models, work products, terminologies, and ontologies.
• The solution is becoming mandatory in health informatics standards organizations for multi-domain projects.