A HIERARCHICAL QUANTUM ONTOLOGY METHOD FOR MITIGATING INTEROPERABILITY IN ELECTRONIC PATIENT HEALTH RECORDS

摘要

In the early 1990s, most medical records were a hybrid of paper and electronic data deployed on combinations of mainframe and personal computers (Evans, 2016). The complexity and inadequacies of the mixed paper-electronic medical records was the driver behind the Institute of Medicine's call to shift to a complete electronic medical record (EMR) system (Institute of Medicine, 1997). Advances in computing technology and the Internet during the last two decades has made access to health information online possible. However, as noted by Adler-Milstein (2017). the major technical issue still to be overcome is lack of semantics interoperability. This paper summarizes current approaches to resolving medical terminology differences, and identifies the interoperability errors driving the interoperability problem. The paper then reviews the theory behind quantum ontology primitives, proposes a new method for developing core reference hierarchical quantum ontology primitive trees integrated with ontology learning to mitigate interoperability errors among the primary medical terminologies, and discusses the potential for this method to increase semantics coverages among the medical terminologies.