Abstract/Summary

Health information systems (HISs) manage healthcare data and support decision-making in order to improve the quality of health service. The nature of healthcare demands, particularly resulting from patient-centred care policies and evidence-based medicine, necessitates the efficient management and usage of healthcare resources. Given the benefits that technological advancements such as sensor-based technologies and ubiquitous computing environments give to healthcare services, the HIS faces various hurdles. The Interoperability across diverse information systems, particularly the complexity introduced by continuously increasing data sources, is one of the greatest obstacles. This research focuses on the semantic ambiguity in information exchange processes and then proposes an ostensive information architecture based on the widely adopted international standard FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) to improve the semantic interoperability between healthcare information systems. The semantic interoperability concerns the capacity of systems to share and interpret the meaning of information exchanged in ecosystems. Motived by the semantic ambiguity generated in FHIR implementation, this research investigates the semiotic sources semantic ambiguity. It then proposes an ostensive information architecture to reduce ambiguity caused by applying FHIR specifications in various contexts for various objectives.