Health care field is fertile ground for semantic tech
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The health care domain featured one of the earliest uses of semantic technology in the public sector — and it could also fuel adoption in NIEM.
The health care domain featured one of the earliest uses of semantic technology in the public sector -- and it could also fuel adoption in the National Information Exchange Model.
Back in 2004, the Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidents Using Reasoning Engines (SAPPHIRE) system rolled out with infrastructure based on semantic Web technologies. The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston spearheaded the effort. Although SAPPHIRE is no longer funded, the center applies what it learned to other interoperability problems. In one project example, SAPPHIRE-based technology enables distributed data collection for disaster preparedness, noted Dr. Parsa Mirhaji, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the center.
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As for NIEM, the health care community may end up being among the first groups that require greater use of semantics. Michael Daconta, CTO at Accelerated Information Management, said the federal government’s "meaningful use" directive, which focuses on the adoption of electronic health records, calls for decision support. That thrust will likely spark interest in semantic technologies.
“By its nature, decision support starts pushing you toward these technologies,” he said.
But some data integration efforts in health care don’t immediately plan to tap semantic technology. The National Institutes of Health’s National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative are working to link autism research datasets using global unique identifiers (GUIDs). The project was described last year in the biomedical and health informatics journal Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).
Matthew McAuliffe, chief of the Biomedical Imaging Research Services Section and NDAR project science manager at NIH, said semantic technology isn’t featuring in its GUID approach. McAuliffe, one of the authors of the JAMIA article, said he may consider NIEM, however.
NIEM, he said, “does look interesting and I plan on looking into it to see if there [is] any use for the model in NDAR.”
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