Semantic interoperability: the future of healthcare

Healthcare interoperability has been a major challenge since the early 1980s and still remains an unsolved issue. Attempts in the past have addressed this problem using bespoke solutions, but a generic solution still eludes the healthcare community. This chapter discusses the various levels at which interoperability needs to be preserved for an uninterrupted exchange of healthcare information. The chapter reviews the various healthcare standards developed in an attempt to solve the interoperability problem at a syntactic level and then moves on to examine medical ontologies developed to solve the problem at a semantic level. The chapter explains the features of semantic web technology that can be leveraged at each level. A literature survey is carried out to gage the current contribution of semantic web technologies in this area along with an analysis of how semantic web technologies can be improved to better suit the health informatics domain and solve the healthcare interoperability challenge.