Integrating CCD Documents - A Way towards Effective Analysis of Patients’ Health Documentation

Juha Puustjärvi, Leena Puustjärvi

2013

Abstract

Although the original purpose of the HL7’s Continuity of Care Documents (CCD) was to deliver clinical summaries between healthcare organizations, nowadays they are increasingly used for collecting patients’ health documentation from various healthcare providers. Usually the collected CCD documents are organized into hierarchical structures that simplify the search of documents, e.g., grouping together the documents by episode, clinical specialty or time period. Yet each clinical document is stored as a stand-alone artefact, meaning that each document is complete and whole in itself. Considering each document only as a complete and a whole in itself also has its drawback: the efficient usage of patients’ health documentation often is data centric, meaning that data should be extracted from various documents and then integrated according to specific criteria. Processing such queries requires the integration of the data of the CCD documents. In this paper we present two methods for integrating CDD documents. In the first method an XML-database is developed and the content of the documents are stored in the database. So the content of clinical documentation can be effectively accessed by database query languages such as SQL. In the second method an OWL ontology for CDD documents is developed and the CCD documents are transformed in the format that is compliant with the ontology and then stored in the ontology. So the content of clinical documentation can be easily accessed by query languages such as RQL and SPARQL. Which integration method is appropriate depends on whether the CDD documents are based on CDA Level 2 or CDA Level 3.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Puustjärvi J. and Puustjärvi L. (2013). Integrating CCD Documents - A Way towards Effective Analysis of Patients’ Health Documentation . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2013) ISBN 978-989-8565-37-2, pages 293-300. DOI: 10.5220/0004175702930300

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf13,
author={Juha Puustjärvi and Leena Puustjärvi},
title={Integrating CCD Documents - A Way towards Effective Analysis of Patients’ Health Documentation},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2013)},
year={2013},
pages={293-300},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004175702930300},
isbn={978-989-8565-37-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics - Volume 1: HEALTHINF, (BIOSTEC 2013)
TI - Integrating CCD Documents - A Way towards Effective Analysis of Patients’ Health Documentation
SN - 978-989-8565-37-2
AU - Puustjärvi J.
AU - Puustjärvi L.
PY - 2013
SP - 293
EP - 300
DO - 10.5220/0004175702930300