Erik, Congrats, it must feel really nice to be able to reach this point. Best of luck for the defense :)
Best regards Seref On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Erik Sundvall <erik.sundvall at liu.se> wrote: > Hi! > > My thesis entitled "Scalability and Semantic Sustainability in Electronic > Health Record Systems" is now available online. It contains many > openEHR-related papers and discussions (see abstract included below). > > Permanent link to electronic version of the thesis: > http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-87702 > > Public PhD defence will be held the 15:th of February, in Link?ping, > Sweden. Faculty opponent: prof. Dipak Kalra, UCL. > Temporary event-information page: http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/2013/phd/ > (That page also contains a form where you have the possibility to indicate > interest in online participation or in getting a recording.) > > Best regards, > Erik Sundvall > erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733 > > Abstract > This work is a small contribution to the greater goal of making software > systems used in healthcare more useful and sustainable. To come closer to > that goal, health record data will need to be more computable and easier to > exchange between systems. > Interoperability refers to getting systems to work together and semantics > concerns the study of meanings. If Semantic interoperability is achieved > then information entered in one information system is usable in other > systems and reusable for many purposes. Scalability refers to the extent to > which a system can gracefully grow by adding more resources. Sustainability > refers more to how to best use available limited resources. Both aspects > are important. > > The main focus and aim of the thesis is to increase knowledge about how to > support scalability and semantic sustainability. It reports explorations of > how to apply aspects of the above to Electronic Health Record (EHR) > systems, associated infrastructure, data structures, terminology systems, > user interfaces and their mutual boundaries. > > Using terminology systems is one way to improve computability and > comparability of data. Modern complex ontologies and terminology systems > can contain hundreds of thousands of concepts that can have many kinds of > relationships to multiple other concepts. This makes visualization > challenging. Many visualization approaches designed to show the local > neighbourhood of a single concept node do not scale well to larger sets of > nodes. The interactive TermViz approach described in this thesis, is > designed to aid users to navigate and comprehend the context of several > nodes simultaneously. Two applications are presented where TermViz aids > management of the boundary between EHR data structures and the terminology > system SNOMED CT. > > The amount of available time from people skilled in health informatics is > limited. Adequate methods and tools are required to develop, maintain and > reuse health-IT solutions in a sustainable way. Multiple levels of > modelling including a fixed reference model and another layer of flexible > reusable ?archetypes? for domain specific data structures, is an approach > with that aim used in openEHR and the ISO 13606 standard. This approach, > including learning, implementing and managing it, is explored from > different angles in this thesis. An architecture applying Representational > State Transfer (REST) to archetype-based EHR systems, in order to address > scalability, is presented. Combined with archetyping this architecture also > aims at enabling a sustainable way of continuously evolving multi-vendor > EHR solutions. An experimental open source implementation of it, aimed for > learning and prototyping, is also presented. > > Manually changing database structures used for storage every time new > versions of archetypes and associated data structures are needed is likely > not a sustainable activity. Thus storage systems that can handle change > with minimal manual interventions are desirable. Initial explorations of > performance and scalability in such systems are also reported. > > Graphical user interfaces focused on EHR navigation, time-perspectives and > highlighting of EHR content are also presented ? illustrating what can be > done with computable health record data and the presented approaches. > > Desirable aspects of semantic sustainability have been discussed, > including: sustainable use of limited resources (such as available time of > skilled people), and reduction of unnecessary risks. A semantic > sustainability perspective should be inspired and informed by research in > complex systems theory, and should also include striving to be highly aware > of when and where technical debt is being built up. Semantic sustainability > is a shared responsibility. > > The combined results presented contribute to increasing knowledge about > ways to support scalability and semantic sustainability in the context of > electronic health record systems. Supporting tools, architectures and > approaches are additional contributions. > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-clinical mailing list > openEHR-clinical at lists.openehr.org > > http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-clinical_lists.openehr.org > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20130130/5d558031/attachment.html>
