CSSDM Ontology to Enable Continuity of Care Data Interoperability

The rapid advancement of digital technologies and recent global pandemic scenarios have led to a growing focus on how these technologies can enhance healthcare service delivery and workflow to address crises. Action plans that consolidate existing digital transformation programs are being reviewed to establish core infrastructure and foundations for sustainable healthcare solutions. Reforming health and social care to personalize home care, for example, can help avoid treatment in overcrowded acute hospital settings and improve the experiences and outcomes for both healthcare professionals and service users. In this information-intensive domain, addressing the interoperability challenge through standards-based roadmaps is crucial for enabling effective connections between health and social care services. This approach facilitates safe and trustworthy data workflows between different healthcare system providers. In this paper, we present a methodology for extracting, transforming, and loading data through a semi-automated process using a Common Semantic Standardized Data Model (CSSDM) to create personalized healthcare knowledge graph (KG). The CSSDM is grounded in the formal ontology of ISO 13940 ContSys and incorporates FHIR-based specifications to support structural attributes for generating KGs. We propose that the CSSDM facilitates data harmonization and linking, offering an alternative approach to interoperability. This approach promotes a novel form of collaboration between companies developing health information systems and cloud-enabled health services. Consequently, it provides multiple stakeholders with access to high-quality data and information sharing.

CSSDH: An Ontology for Social Determinants of Health to Operational Continuity of Care Data Interoperability

The rise of digital platforms has led to an increasing reliance on technology-driven, home-based healthcare solutions, enabling individuals to monitor their health and share information with healthcare professionals as needed. However, creating an efficient care plan management system requires more than just analyzing hospital summaries and Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Factors such as individual user needs and social determinants of health, including living conditions and the flow of healthcare information between different settings, must also be considered. Challenges in this complex healthcare network involve schema diversity (in EHRs, personal health records, etc.) and terminology diversity (e.g., ICD, SNOMED-CT) across ancillary healthcare operations. Establishing interoperability among various systems and applications is crucial, with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) emphasizing the need for patient-centric access and control of healthcare data. In this paper, we propose an integrated ontological model, the Common Semantic Data Model for Social Determinants of Health (CSSDH), by combining ISO/DIS 13940:2024 ContSys with WHO Social Determinants of Health. CSSDH aims to achieve interoperability within the Continuity of Care Network.