Telemedicine often consists of proprietary and heterogeneous solutions leading to data silos, which minimizes the reuse of data. Reusing patient-reported telemedical data have potential benefits for chronically ill patients regarding the course of care, along with potentially reducing workload for healthcare personnel.
Enhanced interoperability and standardization are proposed solutions to bridging the gap between data silos, permitting attainment of the benefits from reusing telemedical data.
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) has been proposed as a solution to enhanced interoperability. However, the flexibility in FHIR has shown to increase system specificity of FHIR-profiles, leading to a reduction in the reuse of these profiles across systems.
Therefore, a method for developing system generic FHIR-profiles (the UGF-method) in a context of telemonitoring a chronic illness on both objective and subjective patient-reported measurements, was proposed in this project. The UGF-method was tested in regard to a specific chronic illness, which resulted in 10 FHIR-profiles. The UGF-method and the resulting FHIR-profiles were evaluated based on the internal validity and reliability.
In conclusion, the UGF-method has the potential to promote development of system generic FHIR-profiles. However, in order to determine the use of the UGF-method and the resulting FHIR-profiles in clinical practice, an evaluation of the external validity and reliability is necessary.