Development of an EHR System for Sharing – A Semantic Perspective

Building up Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems is considered a promising approach to improve health care quality in China. In order to meet the challenges of EHR semantic interoperability, we present a HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) R2 based EHR system prototype developed for Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (GDHTCM). In particular, we demonstrate how semantic technologies are leveraged to benefit EHR users from enabling semantic search against an EHR repository. Pilot users of the system deemed it clinically useful, which encourages us to develop more capabilities based on EHR in future, like cross-institution sharing and integration with a clinical decision support system.