In our last post on Intelligent Healthcare, we talked a bit about Electronic Healthcare Record systems. EHR/EMR technology is an important piece of the larger set of clinical systems as it represents a patient centric organizational framework. However; EHRs are only part of a larger picture. One area that is particularly promising for the application of Semantic technology to healthcare is process management. When we discuss process management in this context, we’re not talking about traditional process management software solutions.

Integration is more than the coding of application or data interfaces. When dealing with complex integration within or across enterprises, there must be sufficient discipline to achieve reproducible results. Furthermore, that discipline must be tailored to the unique requirements of the domain/s in question. Few domains are as complex as Healthcare. Even more important perhaps is that integration cannot be viewed outside of the context of the outcomes within the domains they are meant to serve.

Does your organization find that it can develop a new product faster than your IT group can create a new application to manage it?  Are your existing systems too inflexible?

No, these are not just the opening lines of a sales pitch aimed at selling you the latest IT package or platform. They reflect critical business drivers and challenges.

World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee declared the Semantic Web ‘open for business’ in 2008, celebrating the ratification of the SPARQL query specification by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); the organisation of which he is Director. “I think we’ve got all the pieces to be able to go ahead and do pretty much everything,” he stated in an interview.