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Methods Inf Med 2015; 54(01): 01-04
DOI: 10.3414/ME15-10-0001
Focus Theme – Editorial
Schattauer GmbH

Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems

M. -M. Bouamrane
1   Institute of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, U.K.
,
C. Tao
2   School of Biomedical Informatics, UT Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA
,
I. N. Sarkar
3   Center for Clinical and Translational Science, College of Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Publication Date:
22 January 2018 (online)

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Summary

In recent years, we have witnessed substantial progress in the use of clinical informatics systems to support clinicians during episodes of care, manage specialised domain knowledge, perform complex clinical data analysis and improve the management of health organisations’ resources. However, the vision of fully integrated health information eco systems, which provide relevant information and useful knowledge at the point-of-care, remains elusive. This journal Focus Theme reviews some of the enduring challenges of interoperability and complexity in clinical informatics systems. Furthermore, a range of approaches are proposed in order to address, harness and resolve some of the many remaining issues towards a greater integration of health information systems and extraction of useful or new knowledge from heterogeneous electronic data repositories.

Keywords

Medical informatics - health information management - knowledge bases - biological ontologies - systematized nomenclature of medicine - information storage and retrieval - classification - systems integration
 

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