Managing Demographic Data Inconsistencies in Healthcare Information Systems

Healthcare IT and IS departments have the arduous task of managing the varied information sources into readily accessible, consistent and referential information views. Patient hospital workflows, from admission to discharge, provide a series of data streams for convergences into disparate systems. Protocols such as DICOM and HL7 exist for the purposes of exchanging information within the PACS and RIS information silos in the hospital enterprise. These protocols ensure data confidence for downstream systems, but are not designed to provide referential data cross system in the system-of-systems model. As data crosses the PACS and RIS information domains, data inconsistency is introduced. This paper explores the causes for data disparity and presents a referential data design for disparate systems through the implementation of an XML bus for data exchange and an RDF framework for data semantic.