Semantic Interoperability in HealthCare

Healthcare information is composed of many types of heterogeneous data originating from various clinical, financial and claims systems within and across organizational boundaries. Interoperability of this data is an enormous challenge, as it originates in a bewildering variety of data formats, data models and vocabularies, and it needs to be interoperable, not just syntactically but semantically as well. The work to address these challenges is being tackled by numerous initiatives which will be addressed during this panel discussion.

Complexity and diversity of healthcare data

Understand the challenges and specific methodologies in achieving semantic interoperability

Approach of the Yosemite Project

How is UPMC leveraging semantically harmonized data in various applications and services across its enterprise

Can RDF and Semantic Web standards provide solutions?

Ranga Chandra Gudivada PhD is a manager for Enterprise Medical Informatics at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. At UPMC, he manages the semantic interoperability platform by harmonizing disparate discreet/non-discreet data from various clinical domains and systems. He also oversees efforts around unstructured text mining of clinical notes to actionable knowledge. In previous roles, as a scientist in big pharma, he applied Semantic Web Technologies for various problems in drug discovery and translational genomics. Dr. Gudivada earned his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from University of Cincinnati and work experiences include working at Eli Lilly and Corning Incorporated before joining UPMC.

David Booth is an independent consultant and senior software architect at both Hawaii Resource Group and Rancho BioSciences, using Semantic Web technology to make healthcare and biomedical data interoperable between diverse systems. He previously worked at KnowMED, using Semantic Web technology for healthcare quality-of-care and clinical outcomes measurement, and at PanGenX, applying Semantic Web technology to genomics in support of personalized medicine. Before that he worked on Cleveland Clinic's SemanticDB project, which uses RDF and other semantic technologies to perform cardiovascular research. Prior to that, he was a software architect at HP Software, where his primary focus was emerging technologies. He was a W3C Fellow from 2002 to 2005, where he worked on Web Services standards before becoming involved in Semantic Web technology. He has been programming for many years using a variety of programming languages and operating systems. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA.