Learning the Language of Healthcare: Enabling Semantic Web Technology in CHCS

The goal of this project is to implement a Universal Exchange Language suitable for nationwide adoption across healthcare providers, and accessible to patients and medical researchers under appropriate protections for security and privacy, as envisioned in the 2010 PCAST report on Health Information Technology. The team combines unique expertise on (a) the design and implementation of data management for healthcare applications, in particular in VistA and CHCS, (b) how to use data analytics to map this information into Linked-Data representations, and (c) open source software development and the promotion of open source communities. In Phase I of this project, a prototype implementation of this universal exchange language will be developed by following open source practices, and the resulting language and its associated infrastructure will be made publicly available as an open source resource in order to facilitate its wide adoption. The language will be constructed using agile methodologies and will be based on the data architecture of VistA and CHCS. The experience of the team indicates that the major elements required for implementing this language do exist already, and therefore the effort will be focused on the proper execution of the language implementation and its further promotion.