A Case for Semantic Annotation Of EHR

Today almost all hospitals have adopted Electronic Health Records(EHR), and the digital data that is captured provides an opportunity to improve the patient care. In addition to the EHR in the healthcare system, data such as the readings from smart wearable devices worn by patients also give valuable insight to the patient's health condition. Hence there is a need to consolidate all these heterogeneous information into EHR of patients to get a holistic view of the patient. Currently, different healthcare systems and devices operate in different standards which in turn causes interoperability issues. This paper explores the need to achieve semantic interoperability among healthcare data and proposes a technique to derive inference from semantically annotated EHR data. A proof of concept is done to validate the proposed design.