The Design of the HL7 RIM-based Sharing Components for Clinical Information Systems

The American Health Level Seven (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM) consists of six back-bone classes that have different specialized attributes. Furthermore, for the purpose of enforcing the semantic expression, there are some specific mandatory vocabulary domains have been defined for representing the content values of some attributes. In the light of the fact that it is a duplicated effort on spending a lot of time and human cost to develop and modify Clinical Information Systems (CIS) for most hospitals due to the variety of workflows. This study attempts to design and develop sharing RIM-based components of the CIS for the different business processes. Therefore, the CIS contains data of a consistent format and type. The programmers can do transactions with the RIM-based clinical repository by the sharing RIM-based components. And when developing functions of the CIS, the sharing components also can be adopted in the system. These components not only satisfy physicians- needs in using a CIS but also reduce the time of developing new components of a system. All in all, this study provides a new viewpoint that integrating the data and functions with the business processes, it is an easy and flexible approach to build a new CIS.

• Wei-Yi Yang
• Li-Hui Lee
• Hsiao-Li Gien
• Hsing-Yi Chu
• Yi-Ting Chou
• Der-Ming Liou

• HL7
• Reference Information Model (RIM)
• web service
• process management.

[1] E.-W. Huang, S.-H. Hsiao, and D.-M. Liou, "Design and implementation of a web-based HL7 message generation and validation system," International Journal of Medical Informatics, vol. 70, pp. 49-58, 2003.
[2] "Performance analysis of a medical record exchanges model," IEEE Trans
Inf Technol Biomed., vol. 11, pp. 153-60., Mar 2007.
[3] E.-W. Huang, D.-W. Wang, and D.-M. Liou, "Development of a
deterministic XML schema by resolving structure ambiguity of HL7
messages," Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, vol. 80,
pp. 1-15, 2005.
[4] M. CH, "Data interchange standards in healthcare IT--computable semantic interoperability: now possible but still difficult, do we really
need a better mousetrap?," J Healthc Inf Manag., vol. 20, pp. 71-8., Winter 2006.
[5] J. Koehler, R. Hauser, J. Kter, K. Ryndina, J. Vanhatalo, and M. Wahler,
"The Role of Visual Modeling and Model Transformations in
Business-driven Development," Electronic Notes in Theoretical
Computer Science, vol. 211, pp. 5-15, 2008.
[6] John M├©ller-Jensena, Jesper Simonsenb, and R. K. Iversenc, "Measuring
Effects on the Clinical Practice from a Configured EHR," in Proceedings
of the 4th Scandinavian conference on Health Informatics (SHI 2006),
Aalborg University, Aalborg, 2006.
[7] "Integration of health information resources into electronic health records
using HL7," p. 1195., 2007.
[8] "Toward vocabulary domain specifications for health level 7-coded data
elements," J Am Med Inform Assoc., vol. 7, pp. 333-42., Jul-Aug 2000.
[9] T. J. Eggebraaten, J. W. Tenner, and J. C. Dubbels, "A health-care data
model based on the HL7 Reference Information Model," IBM SYSTEMS
JOURNAL, vol. 46, 2007.