Applying linked data principles to represent patient's electronic health records at Mayo clinic: a case report

Abstract

The Linked Open Data (LOD) community project at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is publishing various open data sets as Resource Description Framework (RDF) on the Web and extending it by setting RDF links between data items from different data sources containing information about genes, proteins, pathways, diseases, and drugs. While this presents a very powerful platform for federated querying and heterogeneous data integration, its true potential can only be realized when combining such information with "real patient" data from electronic health records. In this paper, we report our early experiences in applying Linked Data principles and technologies for representing patient data from electronic health records (EHRs) at Mayo Clinic in RDF. In particular, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept case study leveraging publicly available data from the Linked Open Drug Data cloud to federated querying for type 2 diabetes patients. Our study highlights several challenges and opportunities in using Semantic Web tools and technologies within a healthcare setting for enabling clinical and translational research.