Healthcare Exchange Language Management, Expansion, and Translation Services (HELMETS)

The 2010 President"s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report on health information technology states that today,"there is relatively little standardization in the health data captured and stored by different providers of healthcare services"for the millions of active duty service members supported by the Military Health System. This lack of standardization leads to interoperability problems and the development of healthcare exchange models, which rely on capturing complex concepts in a fixed set of codes. However, these codes, used to share healthcare data across systems, become rapidly out of date as new techniques, research, and practices are adopted by caregivers and administrators. To enable truly universal exchange of healthcare information, we propose to design and demonstrate Healthcare Exchange Language Management, Expansion, and Translation Services (HELMETS). Our service consists of three primary elements: (1) an analysis layer that learns how languages are being used (i.e., convention) based on information extraction and document classification techniques; (2) a knowledge representation layer that captures the semantic structure in disparate exchange languages; and (3) a probabilistic modeling framework that translates between languages based on convention and semantics. This approach ensures that changes in practices, rather than changes in administration and policy, are always reflected.