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Text Mining pp 137–156Cite as

Natural Language Processing Supporting Interoperability in Healthcare

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Abstract

Improving personal health (care) for pervasive and ubiquitous health services requires the involvement of principals with different skills, education, social, cultural, ethical and legal background. They have to cooperate and communicate the necessary information in an interoperable way, so that the information can be used on all sides. The resulting necessary interoperability among human beings and of course systems requires the management and communication of knowledge. This knowledge management should be based on appropriate and hopefully shared ontologies. Natural languages are an efficient and powerful means in representing meaning, knowledge and skills. They balance between special sentence structures and generative flexibility, allowing for unambiguous representation of real world concepts used in communication. This paper provides an overview of the current state of the art functionality in NLP with regard to its application in health information systems interoperability. Therefore this paper deals less with an in-depth analysis of the methodologies currently developed in NLP and rather motivates for using NLP in real-life use cases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Germany, improvements in the healthcare domain are rarely enforced by jurisdictional requirements, but by the strong commitments given by the involved stakeholders. However, these have conflicting interests preventing any real progress.

  2. 2.

    In the healthcare domain, the ambulatory (outpatients with general practitioners) and stationary sector (inpatients with hospitals) have different requirements impacting the communication between those stakeholders.

  3. 3.

    HL7 started its work on enabling and establishing intra-hospital communication, i.e. supporting the data exchange among systems within the same hospital. For this purpose the world-wide most accepted communication standard is “HL7 version 2.x”. A few years after HL7’s inception work, “HL7 Version 3” has started to support inter-hospital and cross-sectoral communication.

  4. 4.

    ICD is the International Classification of Diseases as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) and is used to code information about diagnoses.

  5. 5.

    WYSIWYG: “What You See Is What You Get”.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to their colleagues from SDOs such as IHTSDO and HL7 for open-minded discussions and their kind cooperation and valuable support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agfa HealthCare GmbH, Konrad-Zuse-Platz 1-3, 53227, Bonn, Germany

    Frank Oemig

  2. Medical Faculty, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Bernd Blobel

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  1. Frank Oemig
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  2. Bernd Blobel
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Correspondence to Frank Oemig .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Technische Universität Darmstadt FG Language Technology, Darmstadt, Germany

    Chris Biemann

  2. Computer Science Department, Goethe University WG Text Technology, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

    Alexander Mehler

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Oemig, F., Blobel, B. (2014). Natural Language Processing Supporting Interoperability in Healthcare. In: Biemann, C., Mehler, A. (eds) Text Mining. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12655-5_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12655-5_7

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