Patient-Centric Standards-Based Information Integration

Rapid response to homeland security related incidents requires dynamic integration of military and civilian medical information systems. Currently, this integration process has been difficult to accomplish due to various factors: diversity of medical information systems, lack of universal data standards, plethora of data formats (text,images,video, audio), and the semantic mismatch between the different systems. The last issue, that of semantic integration, is particularly difficult. Dynamic integration involves the use of an integration engine that can perform semantic mapping of the different systems involved. Semantic interoperability is a challenging technical problem. Given any two (database) schemas, it is difficult to automatically map data elements to each other. Syntactically identical element names/labels may represent semantically different entities. Conversely, the same semantic element (such as a patient name) might be represented through different data structures in the two information systems. The overall objective of the proposed Phase I effort is to create the "Logobots Integration Engine" which is a enterprise software product that will enable seamless semantic interoperability between military and civilian medical information systems. This engine will facilitate continuity of care when DoD personnel have to be treated at civilian healthcare facilities.