I graduated from Shanghai Medical University with a major in Clinical Medicine in 1997 and practiced in a surgical department for 2 years before I came to Sweden to pursue a career in Medical Informatics. I am currently doing a part-time Medical Informatics PhD program at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of Linköping University. I just passed the half-time control last year and will hopefully defend my thesis within a year.
Besides my research activities, I am very interested to gain practical experience from real-life health IT solutions. I have played different roles in various e-Health R&D projects in Stockholm area over the years. Now I am working for Cambio Healthcare Systems, a Scandinavia's leading and fastest-growing healthcare IT company. I have a role at Cambio as the Chief Medical Informatics Officer in defining and developing sustainable, interoperable and fully-integrated regional e-Health solutions.
Phone: +46 8 691 4981
Email: rong.chenXXXX@imt.liu.seXX (remove X)
How to achieve semantic interoperability of EHR systems using two-level modelling and reference terminologies? Is it possible to build more adaptive EHR systems based on archetypes than classic template based systems? How could existing EHR systems benefit from the semantic constraints defined in archetype and terminology bindings? How would the archetypes influence the way EHR systems are developed? In which extent does EHR interoperability benefit from open source software?
Standards are the key to achieve interoperable systems. A proven example is internet, which is based on many open standards like TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, and HTML to name a few. General used standards like ISO11404 Data Types are the foundation for exchange of information between systems. Most important for us are the formal standards that are specifically designed for exchange of health information, e.g. EN 13606 from CEN/TC 251, the European standardization body for health informatics.
Giving the ever-changing nature of knowledge and the need to deliver system in time, a small set of information model must be relatively fixed so that systems can be built. The information model also needs to be expressive enough so that any existing domain knowledge and even unforeseen ones can be presented by the information model. Smaller model is also more likely to be agreed on and made standard for data exchange than big ones. We are using and contributing to the set of specifications developed by the openEHR foundation.
Medical terminologies are created and maintained by medical experts and they contain lots of medical knowledge, which also evolves but maybe not as fast as more dynamic ones, e.g. clinical content models or clinical processes. Use of terminologies can improve interoperability of health information system because international terminologies are well-defined and understood, and mostly readily accessible therefore can be used as reference of data. SNOMED CT developed by the College of American Pathologists together with the English National Health Service is an outstanding new concept system with more than 350 000 concepts and around a million terms. We are evaluating the usefulness of this also on a European scale and are introducing it into Sweden.
Interoperable software components released under Open Source Software licenses give users full access to source code, thus spread the knowledge of implementing EHR and related standards. They lowers the barrier of using standards and are likely to attract larger user base than their closed-source counter parts. This helps to create synergies between EHR system developers/researchers and encourages collaboration on common software components crucial for interoperability. Both open source software products and the open source development model are used in my projects. The experience of working on the openEHR Reference Java Implementation Project has led to my second paper.
Last updated: 2008/05/07