Understanding requirements of clinical data standards for developing interoperable knowledge-based DSS: A case study

Knowledge-based Clinical Decision Support Systems (KB-DSSs) promise to provide patient-specific recommendations, generated by matching the KB with electronic patient data from various sources. The challenge of making KB-DSSs interoperable can be simplified by including those data sources into an integrated Personal Health Record (PHR). This paper aims to identify relevant criteria to support the evaluation of data standards for the PHR, following a case-study approach. 15 functional and non- functional criteria were identified and used to evaluate selected standards (HL7 CDA, HL7 vMR and openEHR). Our evaluation identifies their main advantages and disadvantages to support the development of interoperable, data-integrated KB-DSSs