Reuse of Clinical Information: Integrating Primary Care and Clinical Research through a Bidirectional Standard Interface

Nowadays, most healthcare providers archive and manage patients’ information in electronic format. The reuse of such Clinical Information is essential from both a scientific and financial perspective, and for the integration of Primary Care and Clinical Research; which has become a principal goal. The solution proposed aims at integrating data between a web platform, developed for research purposes, and Hospital In-formation Systems. Information is shared through a Bidirec-tional Standard Interface, which adopts biomedical controlled vocabularies and ontologies (LOINC, ICD and SNOMED), and HL7 messaging (CDA V3 R2) for data exchanging. Such an interface allows the importation of data from Hospital In-formation Systems to a web platform, and the exportation of information from the platform to Hospital Information Sys-tems. Currently, this project has been implemented in the Infectious Diseases context, and complete data integration and semantic interoperability has been obtained between the “Li-gurian HIV Clinical Network” and the Infectious Diseases Department of the San Paolo Hospital (Savona, Italy).