Towards European patient summaries based on triple space computing

Abstract

Medical practice today still entails sorting through scattered information on a specific patient. Making things more difficult, the EU, in bringing its member states closer together, is encouraging people's mobility, and raises thus the desire for treatment wherever and whenever necessary. Aware of such a problem, the EU has been fostering the adoption of interoperable electronic health records since the early `90s, but an optimal solution has not yet been found. The current trend is in building up a European Patient Summary as a virtual common infrastructure for accessing citizens' critical health data with respect to interoperability, multilingualism and security-privacy issues. However, such a demanding objective seems difficult to achieve with available technologies. For this reason we aim at evaluating the development of a patient summary based on Triple Space Computing, an innovative paradigm that is significantly moving towards a new era of the Internet, in which communication is achieved via Semantic Web Services based on persistent publication of information instead of messaging.