Exchange of occupational health assessment summaries based on the EN 13606 standard

Abstract

The globalization of world economy stimulates large number of people to search abroad for better employment opportunities. This is the reason to consider the exchange of occupational health assessment summary (OHAS) content from cross-border view point. It is a problem of larger social-significance than the cross-border exchange for International Patient Summary (IPS). While the IPS dataset is well studied in the framework of an international standard, the OHAS remains rather insufficiently explored in the existing literature. This paper proposes a novelty systematic approach to provide a practicable solution to this problem by ensuring semantic interoperability in the exchange of OHAS. It starts by presenting a description of the use case for cross-border exchange. Next, the OHAS dataset is defined on the basis of exploring common data requirements the national legislation of EU countries. The final step of this approach is the design of an EN~13606 archetype of OHAS satisfying all the requirements for semantic interoperability in the exchange of clinical data. Further on, the static, non-volatile and reusable information model of OHAS is used to create EN~13606 instances that are valid with respect to the Reference model and the datatypes of this standard. Finally, this paper demonstrates the software implementation of basic activities in the OHAS use case in a fully functional web application, where the EN~13606 instances are managed by means of a native XML database.