Linked2Safety: A secure linked data medical information space for semantically-interconnecting EHRs advancing patients' safety in medical research

Abstract

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain an increasing wealth of medical information. They have the potential to help significantly in advancing medical research, as well as improve health policies, providing society with additional benefits. However, the European healthcare information space is fragmented due to the lack of legal and technical standards, cost effective platforms, and sustainable business models. The vision of Linked2Safety is to advance clinical practice and accelerate medical research, by providing pharmaceutical companies, healthcare professionals and patients with an innovative secure semantic interoperability framework facilitating the efficient and homogenized access to anonymised distributed EHRs in an aggregate form that enables merging multiple data sources into a single analyses. In this paper a first public introduction to the project is provided along with a clear definition of the problems, and proposed architecture. Three usage scenarios are used to demonstrate the potential impact of the outcomes of the project. © 2012 IEEE.