Semantic Web-Based Information Systems: State-of-the-Art ...

0 E chelberg, Aden, & Thoben
care institutes connected to the network could be implemented rather easily, again
utilising the gatekeeper role of the TTP entity in the network. This would assure
that only authenticated entities could participate in the protocol either as a requestor
or as a record repository and, therefore, would provide a minimum level of quality
control of the data communicated within the network.
Results
The patient identification protocol establishes a concept that, to our knowledge,
has not been available in the health care sector before — an undirected search for
patient records (i.e., a search that does not require a priori information about the
location of the records) that does not violate data protection requirements. The
concept matches well with the peer-to-peer network structure established in the
context of the ARTEMIS project, where many health care institutes may form a
network of services in a very dynamic manner. The use of semantic annotation allows
one to cope with the fact that different institutes identify patients with different
demographics and that no globally unique identifier for patients will be available
for the foreseeable future. The possibility of including national extensions allows
one to maximise the specificity of the search algorithm in environments that can
make use of such extensions, while the inclusion of phonetic encoding allows one
to improve sensitivity by gracefully handling spelling errors. The integration of the
Retrieve Information for Display protocol for the second phase (i.e., the request and
transmission of clinical documents once their location has been identified) provides
a simple read-only access to clinical documents that easily can be integrated with
the existing legacy systems.
An implementation of the patient identification protocol is currently under development
in the context of the ARTEMIS project. The implementation is based on the
ARTEMIS middleware, which provides for the peer-to-peer infrastructure required
by the protocol; that is, message transmission and broadcast facilities based on the
JXTA peer-to-peer communication platform (Gong, 2002), a policy-based security
architecture for a secure communication over unsecured networks and a pre-selection
of record repositories that participate in a query based on geographical location (e.g.,
“we are looking for records located in Germany only”). Pilot applications that will
evaluate the protocol in a clinical setting are planned in the UK and in Turkey. From
these prototypes, we expect practical experience about use patterns, performance,
and scalability of the protocol. Krieg, Hense, Lehnert, and Mattauch (2001) report
about an evaluation of the probabilistic record linkage based on control numbers,
which is used in the Münster Cancer Registry in Germany. They use a set of 19
control numbers computed from the patient’s name (including name of birth, prior
name, and phonetic encoding of the name components) and the day of birth. The
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