Semantic Interoperability in the Context of e-Health

Within the context of Europe’s e-Health strategy, interoperability is the only sustainable way to help partners acting in various locations, with different expertise, perspectives, agendas and status, even cultures and languages, and using distinct information systems from different vendors, to collaborate harmoniously to deliver quality healthcare. Furthermore, to meet the technical demands for the successful support of complex healthcare processes, modern healthcare enterprise architectures must achieve and implement interoperability in all the healthcare domains. Interoperability, which may be expressed using functional, syntactic, or semantic methods, it is necessary to provide information dissemination for all areas in healthcare. Semantic interoperability, which defines the ability for information shared by systems to be understood at the level of formally defined domain concepts, so that the information is computer processable by the receiving systems, it is essential for the development of automatic computer processing healthcare applications and decision support systems. This paper provides an overview of the terminology and definitions needed to understand the implications of interoperability in the context e-Health as well as the influence that semantic interoperability could have for achieving seamless interoperability between several healthcare domains.