Semantic Reconciliation of Electronic Health Records Using Semantic Web Technologies

In this paper, the authors present an approach to reconcile the semantics of distinct medical terms found in personal health records (PHRs - that store data controlled by patients) and electronic medical records (EMRs - that store data controlled by providers) that are utilized to describe the same concept in different systems. The authors present a solution for semantic reconciliation based on RDF and related semantic web technologies. As part of the solution, the authors utilize a centralized repository of ontologies to: uniformly interrogate the medical coding systems in which those terms are defined, extract all of their published synonyms, and save the results as RDF triples. The final step in the process is to employ a reasoner to infer non-explicit synonymy among those terms, hence evidencing the underlying semantics to the PHR and EMR systems for possible further processing.